3 weeks inside Thomas Dambo’s world of trolls

It’s one part physics and two parts imagination. This is what I was able to experience over the three weeks Dambo and his team built the two trolls you can now see at Ninigret Park. It is expected that more trolls will be built around Rhode Island. But for now, “Greta Granite” and “Erik Rock” are the Ocean State’s first.

“I love big stones. In Denmark we don’t have any big bedrock and we don’t have big stone(s) just poking out (of) the ground,” Dambo is explaining to me when pointing out the boulders surrounding Greta. “So I thought there was a good basis for a fairy tale.”

We hop back on the golf cart and head to the first location, where “Erik Rock” is being built. This is in a much more obvious location at the park, just down the road from the Frosty Drew Observatory. Thomas asks if I can get my camera out so he can talk to me about something that happened with the wood they’ve been using for Erik.

“I just wanted to explain because it’s two things that are really important to me,” he says as he starts walking toward the troll-in-progress, “I don’t just judge my sculptures for what they look like. I’m a recycle art activist, so it’s really important for me that they are made of recycled wood. As you can see, this is wood straight off the shelf in the lumber yard.”

Apparently the wood Dambo and his team initially received was new, but it is supposed to be recycled. They remedied the issue and found recycled wood to use for the rest of the build, but this gets to the heart of Dambo’s purpose for his work.

“A sculpture could look super, super beautiful, but then if we only managed to make it partially out of recycled wood, that’ll tear at my integrity as a recycle artist and that’ll really annoy me,” he says.

I visited Dambo and his team to film their progress each of the three weeks they built Greta and Erik. It’s a real joy to be able to spend so much time on a story.

I watched Dambo navigate his ever-growing schedule as his work became more popular. From phone calls with reporters to site surveys for future projects, filming for his own YouTube channel, preparing for speaking events and finding time to be with his wife Alexa and their 2-year-old twin sons, the one thing he seems to have the least amount of time for is actually building these trolls.