Not Kermit: The Puppet Amanda Slack-Smith Can't Walk Past

Ask Amanda Slack-Smith which piece in "Make, Believe, Magic: The Worlds of The Jim Henson Company" stops visitors in their tracks, and she'll tell you about Big Bird and Snuffleupagus wandering toward you down a recreated Sesame Street, or the hush that falls in the Dark Crystal room. Ask her which one stops her, and she goes somewhere else entirely: Taminella, an early Henson character with "this big pink moon face with a fang hanging out."

"Highlights for me, and what makes the greatest impression for people, might be two different things," she says. Ten days into a seven-month exhibition she spent three years building, that gap — between what she loves and what the room loves — is still the thing she finds herself watching.

The show itself began, characteristically, somewhere else. Slack-Smith was in New York with a different exhibition, "Fairy Tales," which included a small section on Labyrinth, when a courtesy visit to the Jim Henson Company turned into something bigger. "The archive is in New York, and they were so generous and passionate about what they do," she says. "And then in the same space is the Jim Henson Creature Shop. So you've got all this creativity — making, building, you know, drawers of eyes and noses — and just the whole world that was very exciting. So they were interested, I was interested, and there we go."

"There we go" undersells it. What followed was three years of transpacific collaboration with a company Slack-Smith describes as unusually "forward-thinking" and "solutions-orientated" — a partnership run, on the Los Angeles end, through Nicole Goldman, the Jim Henson Company's Executive Vice President of Branding. "They might suggest things, and I'd be like, 'Oh my goodness, I didn't know the Thought Lion still exists' — because these things are made to be performed, not archived," Slack-Smith says. "So to actually have them available, I wouldn't know, because they're in their storage."

Nowhere is that tension between "built to perform" and "built to last" more physical than in the exhibition's centrepiece: the actual production sets from Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock, rebuilt at GOMA at genuine puppeteer height. The Great Hall and Doc's Workshop weren't simply crated up and shipped — they'd been dismantled and rebuilt more than once already, across seasons and specials, long before Brisbane entered the picture. "It's a set that's been cut up multiple times," Slack-Smith says. "Each time they've used it — between season one and two, and then the specials — they've cut the set, stored it, brought it back out again." The show's own supervising construction foreman flew in from Canada to help rebuild it with GOMA's workshop crew, and Slack-Smith made a deliberate choice about what to do with the evidence of all that history: leave it visible. "It was important for me that people actually got to see some of that history, because you can walk behind the sets, which is amazing."

Ten days of watching people move through that space has told her something about where attention actually goes, and it isn't always where she expected. Alongside the obvious emotional flashpoints — Sesame Street, Dark Crystal, "obviously seeing Kermit is also important" — she keeps returning to something quieter. "What I'm loving is people are really deep-diving into the works on paper and the characters they don't know, and watching the videos of puppets in action," she says. "They're really engaged with that history and that creativity, and that's exciting." A joint livestream last week with the Jim Henson Company's LA and New York offices — screened alongside GOMA in real time — has since fed a run of interstate and overseas inquiries she wasn't necessarily banking on for a Brisbane season.

None of it, she argues, quite lands until you're standing in it. "When you take a photo of the sets and share them with your friends, they're so well done that they actually look like the TV series — which means you don't get a sense of the scale and immense presence of what it feels like to be walking a puppeteer set," she says. Sets like these are never normally open to the public at all; even on a professional shoot, cast and crew are in and out. "You will never see this again unless you were a VIP or a reporter." At GOMA, for the next seven months, anyone can walk the whole sequence in order — through Doc's studio, through the portal, into the Great Hall, down to Boober's Cave.

What she wants people to leave with isn't nostalgia so much as permission. "I think you're looking at the hand of a number of artists — Jim Henson, obviously, at the heart of the growth of the company — but there's so much there that people are just able to have a personal engagement with a lot of the work," she says. "I want joy, I want that energy, I want that inspiration for creativity. If we have puppeteers in the making who come and see this show, or set builders, or artists of any sort, who feel inspired to move on and do things — then that's a wonderful win."

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