Behind the Seams: How QAGOMA Brought The Jim Henson Company's Real Sets to Brisbane

There's a photograph in the exhibition's own media kit that says more about tonight's opening than any wall text could: a smiling, sweatered Jim Henson, surrounded by five Fraggles, in what looks like an ordinary studio portrait until you notice how completely at ease he looks with a room full of foam and fabric. That photograph is the real subject of 'Make, Believe, Magic: The Worlds of The Jim Henson Company' — a world-exclusive exhibition seven months in the making, taking over the entire ground floor of the Gallery of Modern Art from today.

The headline act, in every sense, is something no other city has hosted: the actual production sets from Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock, shipped from the show's filming base in Canada with the assistance of Tourism and Events Queensland. 'Doc's Workshop' and the vast, cavernous 'Great Hall' — instantly recognisable from every episode's opening sequence — have been rebuilt at GOMA at genuine puppeteer height.

'The sets offer a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to navigate these unique environments, including their rarely seen backstage puppeteer corridors, in an authentic and immersive behind-the-scenes experience,' says the exhibition's curator, QAGOMA Curatorial Manager of the Australian Cinémathèque, Amanda Slack-Smith.

A Story Told in Three Chapters

Rather than a chronological walk-through, the exhibition is structured as three interconnected chapters spanning 70 years of the Company's history, drawn from the accompanying QAGOMA publication. The first, The Method, the Making and the Magic, traces Jim Henson and Jane Nebel's earliest experiments — a 17-year-old Henson responding to a want-ad for television puppeteers in 1954, teaching himself the craft from library books, and building the five-minute Washington, DC sketch show Sam and Friends that gave the world an early, still-frogless Kermit. It follows the Company's parallel life in advertising, where the pressure of the commercial pitch became, in Henson's own working method, training ground for selling longer-form television and stage productions.

The second, The Puppets, the Puppeteers and the Performance, gets into the mechanics most audiences never see: puppeteers folded into tight, awkward spaces beneath couches and camera dollies, coordinating in real time with fellow performers, camera operators and lighting crews, all while delivering a performance most viewers assume is simply a character on screen. It traces the 1979 opening of the first Jim Henson's Creature Shop in London — swiftly followed by The Dark Crystal (1982) and Labyrinth (1986) — as the moment puppeteering's physical and creative demands outgrew a single studio and became an industry in its own right.

The finale, The Daring, the Digital and New Directions, is where the exhibition's tone shifts entirely. Visitors are engulfed in an expansive presentation from The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance — a menagerie of Gelfling and Skeksis, a towering Landstrider, and the production's own Crystal of Truth — tracing how the Company has blended practical creature work with real-time digital puppetry for a new generation of worldbuilding, without ever losing Henson's founding conviction that puppets are actors, not objects, and that technology should serve performance rather than replace it.

More Than Nostalgia

It would be easy to sell an exhibition like this purely on recognition — Kermit, Big Bird, Cookie Monster and the rest of the more than 500 objects on display do plenty of that work themselves. But Jim Henson Company CEO Lisa Henson, in a statement marking the opening, framed the exhibition as something closer to a mission statement than a retrospective.

'For over 70 years countless creatives have dedicated their artistry to reflect my father's fundamental ideas about art, storytelling, characters and worldbuilding, including the idea that the serious work we do — even when making sometimes not-so-serious productions — can positively influence the world,' she said. '"Make, Believe, Magic" is a celebration of all these collaborators as well as the incredible fans from all over the world who have supported our work.'

QAGOMA Director Chris Saines CNZM called it 'the most comprehensive collection of the Company's creative output to date,' and the scale backs that up: more than 500 objects, from handcrafted puppets and animatronic creatures to full-scale sets, costumes, original drawings and digital puppetry, alongside a richly illustrated hardcover publication with contributions from Slack-Smith, cinema program curator Dr Victoria Wareham, Lisa Henson, Jim Henson Company Chairman Brian Henson, Fraggle Rock creative supervisor John Tartaglia, and Oscar-winning Australian animator Adam Elliot.

'Make, Believe, Magic: The Worlds of The Jim Henson Company' is showing at GOMA now until 18 April 2027.