For more than a decade, Danish recycling artist Thomas Dambo has scattered wooden troll sculptures around the world. He has created almost 200 in 19 countries.
Now the poet and former hip-hop artist is bringing a collection of fairy tale-inspired creations in from the cold for his first museum exhibit.
“The Garbage Man,” at the Arken Museum of Contemporary Art on the outskirts of Copenhagen, tells the story of a group of mischievous trolls who secretly move into the museum, take it over and redesign it.
“They build and leave a giant human made of trash … as a lesson for the humans to behave better and don’t put their trash where everybody else lives,” Dambo said at his studio near the Danish capital.
The 46-year-old artist started spreading his trolls back in 2014, when he built two sculptures for a Danish music festival.
Two years later, he hid six giant trolls in wooded areas around Copenhagen. The project went viral, drawing millions of viewers online.
“I was like, if I tell a story that combines them all, then when I’ve done this (for) 10 years, I will probably have made over 100 sculptures and … I have made the world into my stage,” he said.
Twelve years on, Dambo has made almost 200. The artist and his team build about 25 new trolls annually. “Long Leif,” the tallest at 13 meters (43 feet) high, stands in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota.
Usually, Dambo’s work is as much treasure hunt as exhibit. His fairy-tale creations are tucked away in forests, mountains, jungles and grasslands around the world, discoverable using an online “Troll Map.”
There is “Little Lisa” hidden in a German forest, and “Happy Kim” lounging in a South Korean botanical garden.
Children clamber and adults gasp as they find the trolls. Dambo estimates about 5 million people visit his works annually.
“The sculptures bring people out to experience things that they would otherwise have been too lazy or maybe not creative enough to go and visit,” he said. “My trolls, they bring people to all these small, little corners of the world.”
Each of Dambo’s trolls has a unique name and design. In the Arken exhibit, which opens Sunday and will be on show until Nov. 29, his new works are based on friends he had when growing up.
They have “personalities of a late teenage, young 20s type of group of boys that are causing havoc, and the type of gang that would break into a museum and fill it up with trash,” Dambo said.
Trolls often appear in Scandinavian folklore, but Dambo said he chose to work with the mythical creatures as a vehicle to convey messages on waste and recycling.
The recycling artist’s sculptures are made almost entirely from waste and discarded materials, such as wooden pallets, old furniture and whisky barrels.
He said a museum exhibit means he can experiment with materials that wouldn’t survive outdoors, including discarded electronics, cardboard and clothes, lots of them.
In one corner, a troll named “Dyna Dee” dozes on a 6-meter (nearly 20-foot) mound of discarded clothing from a local recycling organization.
Dambo hopes museum visitors will leave with an urge to buy less.
“It’s not really about recycling, it’s about you probably have enough clothes in your cabinet to wear for the rest of your life,” he said. “This is not my recycling project, this is my stop buying stuff project.”
