The giant trolls are here.
A unique art project is leaving its big footprint on the Seattle area and the Pacific Northwest, bringing with it a message about waste, the environment and getting out in nature.
Danish environmental artist and storyteller Thomas Dambo and a team of volunteers have completed four of the six trolls that are part of a public exhibition titled “Northwest Trolls: Way of the Bird King.” The project is funded in part by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.
Trolls can now be found in Portland, Bainbridge Island, Wash., and West Seattle, and on Friday Dambo put the finishing touches on a roughly 20-foot-tall troll named “Jakob 2 Trees,” along the Rainier Trail in Issaquah, Wash., 15 miles east of Seattle. Two more trolls will be built in the coming weeks: on Vashon Island and in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood.
“It’s been a long project,” Dambo said Friday, sounding a bit exhausted from a trip that saw him leave his native Denmark on May 25 to construct 10 trolls total in the U.S.
Over the years he’s installed more than 120 of the larger-than-life sculptures in locations around the world. The interactive works are built with recycled materials such as wooden pallets, and are meant to tell a tale of protecting nature.
“It has such a great, positive energy. It makes you happy,” said Marie Cermak, of Bellevue, Wash., who was walking the trail on Friday and stopped to watch the workers. “They utilize the space so well.”
We caught up with Dambo in Issaquah to check out Jakob and chat about the process, what it represents and what Dambo hopes people take away from it all. Our Q&A has been edited for clarity and brevity.
How many hours does it take to build each troll?
“Two weeks for each. We’re overlapping them so they’re going side by side. I have two teams.”
Is the process getting routine now or do you find some excitement or surprise each time you do one of these?
“No two are alike, of course. I’ve done one that’s standing up before, and I’ve done one that’s sitting down before. But it’s in another type of nature. It’s another type of scrap wood that we get our hands on. It’s another team, another culture, another country, another language. That makes it interesting. And I don’t like to do the same, so I always make them different. And we’ve gotten better and better and better. It’s also the same to the extent that the whole team knows exactly what they’re doing.”
Do the birdhouses signify anything in particular?
“I have been doing street art with birdhouses back in Europe for many years — thousands of birdhouses. That was one of my first big art installations that I did, it was a transition from painting graffiti to hanging birdhouses up in the city because I figured that if I stopped painting graffiti nobody would call the police. That worked great.
“I’ve brought my birdhouses into the next projects I’ve been doing, and the troll project. We make these poles with birdhouses on them and then we put them up at the entrance ways into where the troll is as an indication of where they are.”
How long will this troll be here?
“I believe that the permit is for three years here. But the potential is always that they stay for much longer. The people like them and they keep fixing them.”
Do you have an estimation for how much Jakob weighs?
“We use approximately five tons of scrap wood building one troll. There’s 12 million tons of scrap wood that’s driven to the landfill every year in the United States, scrap wood that had the potential to be recycled. And that’s enough for, I believe, 2.4 million trolls a year.”
That’s a lot of birdhouses, too.
“It’s cities of houses you could build with it.”
Do you ever have any issues with vandalism?
“I haven’t had too many. I think the difference between vandalism and terrorism is that vandalism is something that you just do by coincidence when you pass by and you’re in a bad mood. And terrorism is something that’s planned, where you go and search out a specific location. How many people want to be the troll terrorist and are so mad at the troll and look at the treasure map to find it to only go and destroy it? I think those people might just kick their neighbor’s mailbox or something.”
How many people have worked on this across the whole Northwest project?
“A couple hundred. There’s a list of 1,300 who signed up, but there was no room for them. There are so many people who want to be a part of a positive change, and they want to be a part of something fun and something special. Make people happy, they come and help you. And you get all the material for free and you’re actually cleaning the world when you’re doing it.”
What tech do you use if any to help people understand what this is?
“We installed metal signs with the face of the troll, a QR code, the website and the name and the number of the troll. People have been requesting some type of way to collect which ones they’ve seen. Now I’m making a type of ‘troll card’ that represents each troll, and on the backside of the card there’s a white circle and you can overlay that with the engraved face on the sign and trace over it with a pencil or something. So you get the seal of approval that you’ve actually physically been here.”
So you get something physical, not just a digital representation?
“I don’t want to make a computer game. My project is about wilderness and nature and hands on. There’s plenty of projects that are about computers. In order to be able to protect the natural world, we need to get people out into it. If you only live inside the computer and work inside your computer and love and laugh and everything happens inside your computer, then why care about a beetle or some tree that is getting extinct?”
Editor’s note: Dambo and team are working with Adventure Labs, a tech company in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, to create geocaching adventures. Three have been completed for Portland, Bainbridge Island and West Seattle so far.
What do you hope is the main takeaway for people who come upon your trolls?
“I hope that they’ll just get a little whimsy in their life and they’ll be smiling. Or crying if they’re scared — that’s also OK. And I hope that all the local people who have come together here to help and create it that they will carry on the story. It was 14 days and a crazy crew from Denmark and 50 volunteers and a whole mountain of scrap wood — and then we created this. What else could we build out of our trash? Rather than building our landfills bigger and bigger and our nature reserves smaller and smaller?”
Find more about Dambo’s “Northwest Trolls: Way of the Bird King” project at his website and view locations via his troll map.
The project is being managed by the Seattle-based Scan Design Foundation, a private organization founded in 2002 to honor the legacy of Inger and Jens Bruun and advance Danish-American relations by supporting cultural exchanges focused on environmental sustainability.
The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, a philanthropic organization created by the late Microsoft co-founder and his sister, Jody Allen, is helping to fund the project. Media partners include the Embassy of Denmark, Visit Seattle, and Washington State Tourism.
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