Magic, made by hand: inside the world-first exhibition revealing how Jim Henson’s puppets came to life

How simplicity means embracing complexity

There’s a phrase repeated so often inside the Company it’s basically scripture: simple is good. Everyone quotes it. Almost no one who worked for Jim seems to have fully believed it.

“I think I may have taken the idea of simple at face value,” Amanda admits. “But having now looked more closely at the work of the Company, I realised why it probably meant effortless. And there’s a heck of a lot of work that has to go into becoming effortless.”

Karen has spent three decades in the paper trail that proves it. Take Big Bird – designed first in 1963 for a frozen-food commercial that never got made, then revived years later. Even after that, Jim kept trying to refine it: Karen described a technical drawing in the archive for a version of the puppet where the performer stands backwards inside the costume, arms overhead, purely so the puppet’s knees would bend the way a real bird’s do. “It was way too much to ask of a performer, and it never got made.” As Karen put it, quoting the writer Jerry Juhl: “Jim would say simple is good, but then plan the most complicated thing you could ever imagine.”

Nowhere is that contradiction more literal than Humongous, the fifteen-foot animatronic giant built for Labyrinth. Jim’s request was almost comically modest – a giant who could walk and throw his arms around. Getting there wasn’t simple at all: an early fibreglass body wouldn’t flex, so the team invented a whole new polyurethane skin from scratch. What the audience saw was a giant walking toward them. It took months of engineering failure, hidden behind one smooth gesture.

Imperfection becomes proof someone was actually there. In Jim’s world, it’s the ping-pong balls sliced in half for Kermitss eyes – still slightly imperfect spheres, still catching the light exactly wrong, in a way that somehow reads as exactly right. Even the Muppets have never let it go: Miss Piggy once looked Kermit dead in the eye and called them “two ping-pong balls floating in a pond of green algae”. Nobody’s tried to fix it. Why would they? The flaw is the character.

How do puppeteers train and get hired?

There’s a version of this story repeated often enough to sound like settled fact: that puppeteering wasn’t a real career before the Company came along, and that Jim single-handedly invented the job. Karen pushed back the moment I put it to her. “There were very serious professional puppeteers before Jim, particularly in Europe.” Sergey Obraztsov had been running the Moscow State Puppet Theatre – a state-funded company that would grow into the largest in the world – since 1931, three decades before Jim built his first puppet for TV.

What Jim actually did was narrower: “puppetry for television was almost invented by Jim,” Karen said, because before him, TV puppeteers mostly pointed a camera at their existing stage act. Jim didn’t invent puppetry, he translated it for a medium that hadn’t existed yet.

Here’s the part that matters if you’re trying to get into the industry: Jim built the doorway, even if he didn’t build the room. He often recruited by turning up at puppeteer conventions and staying in touch with the ones who showed promise. He ran workshops himself; his son Brian still runs them. The Henson and Jane Henson Foundations fund the only puppetry degree program in the US. There was never a locked door, just one that rarely opens the way you’d expect.

Memories and magic no single museum could hold

Right now, there’s no dedicated Jim Henson Museum anywhere in the world. His family could have built one thing – a single, prestigious, permanent home. They chose the opposite. Karen was in the room when the decision got made in the late-1990s. Rather than concentrate the collection, they decided to split it deliberately across institutions that would each reach a different audience through their own lens – a puppetry museum, a film museum, a museum of American history, each showing a different, true version of who Jim was. “It turned out, to be honest, to be brilliant,” Karen said.

Some of that fragmentation wasn’t a choice at all. In 2004, the Henson family sold The Muppets – the characters most people mean when they say “Jim Henson” – to Disney. But not everything went with the sale. Puppets already given to museums back in the late-1990s belonged to those museums outright, free to be lent wherever they liked – which is how GOMA managed to borrow from so many different places at once. Disney borrowed from its own archive too – including the Kermit now on display. The character most people picture first, if asked to name a Muppet, now belongs, on paper, to someone else.

Amanda keeps circling one question underneath the whole exhibition: is what matters here the physical object, or the memory it produces in the person standing in front of it? “Can it be both?” she asked, then answered herself. “I think it is both.”

Karen does something similar, from inside the archive. “Anything you talk about with me, I can make a connection to something with the Jim Henson Company,” she says. It’s basically what Amanda does with a gallery space – taking two stories from different times in history and showing you the thread running underneath. A curator can help you see that something is alive in the moment. An archivist can prove it always was. Between them, that’s the magic – and neither one works without the other.

Make, Believe, Magic: The Worlds of The Jim Henson Company opens at GOMA, Brisbane until 18 April 2027.