An ordinary evening at the Grimsbys’.
Deep within a room crowded with aging televisions, the Grimsbys indulge their fondness for science and oddities. Screens flicker between static and medical imagery, offering glimpses into the strange, vulnerable workings of the body. Long fingers gesture toward the broadcasts. A painted smile remains cheerfully fixed. Here, an interest in what lies beneath the skin is simply part of domestic life.
The Grimsbys inhabit a world where curiosity has accumulated in every corner. Their surroundings suggest a household assembled around unusual enthusiasms, where a scientific demonstration might pass for evening entertainment and the unsettling becomes familiar through repetition. There is affection in their strangeness, a sense that these figures belong together even when their gestures and expressions resist our understanding. We are watching a private family ritual without knowing its rules.
Every character was made by hand by Karen Jerzyk, who also filmed the work herself. Combining stop-motion animation with live-action performances by people in costume, the piece brings different kinds of movement into the same space. The incremental motion of animation meets the physical presence of a performer inside a handmade character, giving the Grimsbys an existence that feels suspended between object and living being.
The televisions offer another threshold: bodies within screens, screens within a room, and a household absorbed in looking. As viewers, we join their fascination. The longer we spend in their company, the less certain we become of what should trouble us—the images being transmitted, the figures watching them, or how quickly we begin to feel at home.
Part of The Grimsbys, a moving-image series by Karen Jerzyk exploring the domestic lives of handmade characters with a taste for science, peculiar discoveries, and the everyday pleasures of being strange.
