[The works of Danish artist Thomas Dambo (b. 1979) celebrate the intersection of art, nature, storytelling, and recycling.
[Born in Odense, Denmark, Dambo grew up in a household where resourcefulness and creativity thrived. After exploring hip-hop, beatboxing, graffiti, and street art as he grew up, Thomas pursued a Master’s degree in Interaction Design at the Kolding School of Design (in Kolding, Denmark), where he began experimenting with large-scale installations made from reclaimed materials.
[Since 2014, Thomas (now based in Copenhagen) has become internationally known for his monumental wooden trolls—sculptures made from recycled wood and accompanied by narratives that blend folklore, environmentalism, and community participation. His works span North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
[A lifelong advocate for upcycling and public engagement, Thomas Dambo’s projects continually challenge the boundaries between art, adventure, and activism.
[In Old Norse texts and later Scandinavian folklore, trolls are deeply woven into the untamed wilderness of the Nordic landscape. Trolls live in isolated areas of rocks, mountains, caves, and they personify the raw, dangerous elements of the Nordic landscape—barren rocks, crushing avalanches, and dark, impenetrable forests, and are often hostile to human beings.
[In traditional Scandinavian folklore and Norse mythology, the appearance of trolls varies, falling generally into three archetypes. One type are giant monsters with multiple heads or a single, giant eye in the middle of their foreheads. They have grotesque faces, display animalistic traits, and often look like the landscape itself.
[In contrast, many legends describe trolls as looking almost exactly like human beings. They could walk among humans entirely unnoticed, wearing normal clothes and possessing human-like faces. The only way to spot a troll in human guise was to spot a tail hidden in their clothing, or to notice a rough, stocky, or “uncanny” build.
[Wikipedia defines the uncanny as “the psychological experience of an event or individual as not simply mysterious, but frightening in a way that feels oddly familiar. This phenomenon is used to describe incidents where a familiar thing or event is encountered in an unsettling, eerie, or taboo context.” (There is something of a discussion of “uncanny” and “uncanny valley” in my posts “The Reviews of Dreams of Violets” [5 August 2026] and “‘It Looks Like Us’” by Joshua Glass [31 October 2023].)
[The third category of trolls are man-sized or smaller, similar to goblins or dwarves. They are short, stocky, and grotesque, wearing plain, rustic clothing, living in underground communities, and are known more for being mischievous, hoarding gold, and sneaking onto farms at night than crushing things with raw size.
[Dambo’s public installations both feature these giant humanoid creatures, their roles and temperaments contrast sharply. “The Garbage Artist” bridges the gap between Scandinavian folklore and modern environmentalism by reimagining the trolls as gentle, recycled giants that advocate for the earth.
[He synthesizes the folklore archetype of trolls as ancient, fierce “protectors of the forest” and completely reimagines their physical aesthetic to match his environmental mission. He subverts the image of the fearsome, giant trolls who look like the threatening organic environment into gentle protectors of nature. Instead of the grotesque features, such as three heads, tusks, or bleeding eyes, Dambo’s trolls have expressive, gentle, and humanoid faces with which viewers can connect emotionally.
[Dambo creates a brand-new genre
of troll—not the scary, monstrous creatures of old texts, but the Eco-Guardian
Giant, a being that feels ancient and mythical, yet explicitly belongs to the
modern world.]
“WHERE THE WILD
THINGS ARE AN ECONOMIC BLESSING”
by Ryley Ober
[The article below, reported from Tupper Lake, New York, was published in the New York Times of 24 October 2026, Section C (“Arts”); it was also posted to the Times’ website as “How Giant Trolls Are Helping Transform an Adirondack Mill Town” on 9 October.]
In a clearing amid the dense Adirondack forest, a giant wooden troll lifts a maple-tree sapling toward the early autumn sky. Hundreds of boulders are splayed out around him, and children jump from rock to rock, their laughter filling the space.
“I feel like I’m in Minecraft!” Axel Karatayev, 6, yells to his mother as he leaps.
The 36-foot-tall installation, unveiled last month at the Wild Center in northern New York (see below), is the state’s first permanent artwork by Thomas Dambo, the internationally acclaimed Danish recycle artist. The sculpture is named “Patrick Sapling” in honor of Patrick Dougherty, a now-retired American sculptor [b. 1945] who spent decades creating works from tree saplings and whose last-standing outdoor installation [Stickwork (2021)] is also at the Wild Center.
For Tupper Lake [in Franklin County, on the northern border with Canada], with a population of around 5,000, the sculpture brings hope that a short-term surge in visitors will translate into a long-term boost for the town’s economy.
All summer, the town’s charming main street teemed with thousands of fans who traveled to see a different installation by Mr. Dambo called “Trolls: Save the Humans” [world premiere: Atlanta Botanical Garden, 18 February 2023]. This traveling exhibition, on display at the Wild Center until Oct. 31, depicts six larger-than-life trolls as they attempt to teach humans how to rediscover and protect nature.
A ‘Proof of Concept’
Tupper Lake, a once-bustling blue-collar lumber town, has enthusiastically welcomed the trolls. Miniature versions are hidden in local businesses, waiting to be found in a scavenger hunt created by the Wild Center and the regional tourism office. Raquette River Brewing created a troll-inspired German pilsner beer that’s served at local restaurants. A troll-themed play [Once, in the Time of Trolls, a one-act play by Sandra Fenichel Asher based on Norwegian folk tales] and workshops for building Mr. Dambo’s signature birdhouses have taken over the town’s arts scene.
“I’ve been here 37 years and I’ve never had a busier summer,” said Tina Merrihew, 59, who owns a half-laundromat, half-doughnut shop. “Amazing what trolls can do. They’re instigators.”
Growing up in Scandinavia, Mr. Dambo loved learning about trolls from Nordic folklore, he said in an interview. While studying at the prestigious Kolding School of Design, he got a gig working in a warehouse, where he saw how much plywood from around the world ended up discarded in Denmark.
The self-proclaimed “garbage artist” had an idea: What if he built an army of trolls and returned them to the forest? Mr. Dambo created his first examples in 2014 in Denmark, and over the years, he’s installed nearly 200 across the globe.
His first traveling exhibition, called “Save the Humans,” launched in 2023 at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. Within a couple of months, the exhibition was booked by venues for the next seven years, Mr. Dambo said. So he launched another traveling team of creatures in 2025 called “Trolls: A Field Study” [The North Carolina Arboretum (Asheville, N.C.), 15 November 2025]. This group of 12 smaller trolls are easier to relocate as they study the human species across the country.
Mr. Dambo’s migrating sculptures have left a stream of tourism revenue in their wake. During a three-month North American debut in Asheville, N.C., “A Field Study” generated over $6 million in direct spending from November 2025 to February 2026, according to the local tourism board.
Mr. Dambo said he never set out to spur economic growth. But the fact that he’s made such a big impact from discarded materials is an “ultimate proof of concept that we should build our world out of trash, rather than drown in it.”
A Former Mill Town Gets Creative
While fun and fantastical, the intricate trolls are also symbolic of Tupper Lake’s difficult, decades-long transition from a once-proud logging town to one that relies on its natural resources in a new way for tourism.
In the 1970s and ’80s, Tupper Lake was a “booming little town” of mill workers, said Rick Dattola, the town supervisor. But the timber mills closed, a popular ski area shuttered and a resort development that promised over 500 new jobs recently fell into foreclosure. No matter what the town tried, industry just wouldn’t return, Mr. Dattola said.
Only traces of the town’s once-busy sawmills remain. In late September, an early autumn mist hung over Raquette Pond at the town’s waterfront park, where a mill once set a world record for the amount of lumber sawed in a single day.
Across the park, a smokestack protruded into the sky, labeled with the letters “OWD,” a remnant of the Oval Wood Dish Factory. Once home to Tupper Lake’s biggest employer, the building is being repurposed into an affordable apartment complex.
Now, everything the town does for economic development is about tourism, specifically outdoor recreation, Mr. Dattola said. That transition from manufacturing was tough: It’s hard to keep taxes down and prices affordable when the tax base keeps shrinking, he said.
But things are improving, and the Wild Center has been a huge part of that, according to Mr. Dattola. When the center opened an elevated nature trail called the Wild Walk in 2015, attendance tripled — rising to more than 150,000 visitors a year, said Nick Gunn, the science museum’s marketing director.
After the summer of trolls, the center is on pace to break visitation records by 182 percent, Mr. Gunn said. About 75 percent of those visitors had never been to the Adirondacks before, according to post-visit surveys, Mr. Gunn said.
The visitor numbers reflect the true cult following that Mr. Dambo’s work has generated. Bettina August, 64, a retired filmmaker, drove from Florida to Tupper Lake in a converted minivan on her quest to see all of Mr. Dambo’s trolls. She’s at 39 and counting.
After building film sets for 25 years, Ms. August said she thinks the trolls are unique because of their grand size and the conceptual design that went into creating the experience of finding them.
[The evocation of “conceptual design,” I take as a reference to Conceptual Art, the art style that flourished from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. It elevated ideas and the process of creation over product and technique, making the concept the material of the art work.]
“The thought process of it is amazing to me,” she said. “And it gives me an excuse to travel.”
[Ryley Ober is a travel reporter at the New York Times and a member of the 2026-27 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers. She writes about the travel industry as it affects travelers, covering a broad range of topics, from flight fiascos and visa rule changes to dream destinations.
[She’s particularly interested in the effects of artificial intelligence on the industry, as well as the intersection of travel and environmental issues, finding creative ways to explain complicated issues.
[Before joining the Times, Ober reported on the effects of crime, court decisions and a natural disaster on the people in the Appalachian town of Asheville, North Carolina, for USA Today and the Asheville Citizen-Times. Through storytelling, data-driven research and source building, she has aimed to explain how social issues shape lives. She grew up in Florida and studied journalism at Indiana University.]
* *
* *
“DAY TRIP
DESTINATION: GIANT TROLLS BRING
by Courtney Potts
[This article is from the Daily Sentinel [Rome, New York] of 15 July 2026; it was posted at The Wild Center Welcomes Giant Troll Sculptures | Entertainment/Life | romesentinel.com.]
TUPPER LAKE — The Adirondacks look even more like a fairy tale forest this summer thanks to some larger-than-life characters visiting The Wild Center in Tupper Lake.
Six “folklore-inspired” troll sculptures are on display at the center from now through Oct. 31 as part of “TROLLS: Save the Humans,” a traveling exhibition by Danish artist Thomas Dambo, who is known for making art from recycled materials. Each of the 15- to 25-foot-tall trolls is made entirely from reclaimed materials and “tucked away” in the woods, waiting to be discovered somewhere along The Wild Center’s 3.5 miles of walking trails, said Nick Gunn, the center’s director of marketing and visitor experience.
“This exhibit is very whimsical and it’s very cool . . . but they bring with them a serious message of sustainability and being better stewards for the planet, and I think that’s one of the big takeaways,” Gunn said.
The center is the first venue to host any of Dambo’s famous troll sculptures in New York state, and the exhibit already has attracted visitors from as far away as Florida and Oklahoma, Gunn said.
Several troll-themed events also are planned this summer, including Troll Tuesdays, taking place from 4 to 7 p.m. each Tuesday through Aug. 11. Visitors can look forward to live music, food trucks, troll-inspired craft projects and “a little bit of a party atmosphere” on those afternoons, Gunn said.
But the trolls are far from the only reason to visit The Wild Center.
Part natural history museum, part science center, and part aquarium, the center was voted Best Science Museum in the country by USA Today readers in 2024. With 54,000 square feet of indoor exhibit space and 115 acres of outdoor space, its mission is to spotlight the Adirondacks and “to inspire a passion for nature so that people want to protect it,” Gunn said.
Visitors should give themselves three or four hours to experience everything it has to offer, he said — maybe up to five or six hours if they also want to find all six trolls.
One highlight is the Wild Walk, an elevated, mostly accessible walking path that takes visitors up above the treetops and leads to a 10-foot-wide replica of a bald eagle’s nest where they can enjoy the view. Also popular with families are the Pines Play Area, described on the website as “a wild playground,” and the Raquette River roll ball runs.
For the ball runs, visitors can borrow a wooden ball inside the center — or purchase one to keep for $6 — and send it down a series of wooden tracks as they make their way along the 1-mile Fen Trail loop.
Indoor exhibits include the Hall of the Adirondacks, where you can see live animals like river otters and turtles; a virtual reality experience called Birdly that promises to “fulfill the ultimate dream of flying;” and a panoramic theater that shows short nature films.
While the current troll exhibit has to keep traveling come November, The Wild Center hopes to one day have a permanent troll of its very own. The artist visited the center last fall and discussed the possibility of creating a sculpture that is “totally custom and unique to the Adirondacks,” Gunn said.
The center hopes to raise $500,000 this summer to make that project a reality.
“I think that there are no shortage of places that would love to have a permanent Thomas Dambo installation and, you know, he chose the Adirondacks and that’s something that we’re really proud of and we’re hopeful that people want to support it . . .,” Gunn said. “It’s something that we’re optimistic about, but we certainly need help to make it a reality.”
Add a stop: In connection with the “TROLLS” exhibit, several businesses in Tupper Lake and the surrounding area have organized a troll-themed scavenger hunt this summer. Anyone who is interested can sign up on The Wild Center’s website and visit participating attractions and businesses for a chance to win prizes. Gunn also recommends trying some of the “world-class food and breweries” in Tupper Lake, or going for a walk or a bike ride on the Adirondack Rail Trail.
“That’s really beautiful and one of my favorite things that’s been developed here in recent years,” he said.
[Courtney Potts is a regional freelance feature writer and journalist across Upstate New York and a contributing writer for the Rome Daily Sentinel, a local newspaper based in Rome (Oneida County). She frequently writes feature articles focusing on local business, culture, day-trip destinations, and entertainment across Central New York and the Mohawk Valley region.
[In addition to her work for the Daily Sentinel, her writing has been published by the Utica Observer-Dispatch (Oneida County) and The WC Press in West Chester, Pennsylvania (Chester County).]
* *
* *
“THE WILD CENTER’S
EVOLUTION”
by Tom French
[This profile of Tupper Lake’s natural history center ran in the Adirondack Explorer, a nonprofit magazine and website based in Saranac Lake, New York (Franklin and Essex Counties), on 4 May 2026. It can be found online at The Wild Center’s evolution - Adirondack Explorer.]
From an idea that first took shape in 1999, Tupper Lake’s natural history museum celebrates its 20th anniversary this year
When Betsy Lowe’s camp on Long Lake burned to the ground in the summer of 1998, she didn’t just lose a seasonal home; she found a calling. At the time, Lowe was a public affairs specialist for the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) in Ray Brook. The fire—ignited by a bear that had broken in and knocked a refrigerator onto a propane line—became the subject of one of her lobby displays, which covered topics such as the 1995 microburst [intense, localized downdraft of air that spreads on the ground, causing rapid changes in wind direction and speed] and the 1998 ice storm.
“The displays weren’t advertised, but we had lots of people coming in all the time,” Lowe recalls. “I thought, ‘We should do more to share how nature works.’ That’s when I realized we needed a natural history museum.”
Building momentum
With Lake Placid [30 miles east of Tupper Lake] known for the Olympics and Saranac Lake [20 miles northeast of Tupper Lake] as an artists’ community, Lowe focused on Tupper Lake “because it was at a crossroads.” Lowe shared the idea with others and organized a series of public meetings. “And boy, the crowds really showed up. Everybody wanted to hear more about the idea,” she said.
The idea was so popular that a single letter to residents of the area raised a half-million dollars. The seed money allowed the organizers to hire Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum (HOK), a design, architecture, engineering and planning firm responsible for hundreds of projects around the world including both Smithsonian Air and Space facilities in Washington, D.C. HOK was also involved with the design of the 1980 Olympic Center, now the Herb Brooks Arena [Lake Placid].
The Natural History Museum of the Adirondacks, the official name of The Wild Center [until 2006, when the Center opened and adopted its current name], was incorporated as a nonprofit by June 1999. That fall, the Tupper Lake School District provided 31 acres adjacent to the elementary school that included some shoreline along the Raquette River.
During the next six years, $30 million was raised from 6,000 donors alongside state and federal sources. When the two-year construction project finished in 2006, The Wild Center was the first LEED-certified [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, a worldwide green building certification program] museum in New York state, featuring a solar array and living roof [or “green roof”: a roof of a building that is partially or completely covered with vegetation and a growing medium]. The grand opening on July 4 drew 5,000 people.
Upping the game
When Executive Director Stephanie Ratcliffe arrived in 2002, with experience at the Smithsonian Institution, Brooklyn Children’s Museum and Maryland Science Center [Baltimore], she knew opening the doors was only the beginning.
“If you don’t keep adding something new, the audience will diminish. It’s a very predictable pattern that happens to every museum.”
This philosophy led to a decade of rapid expansion:
• 2009: Introduced its annual Adirondack
Youth Climate Summit and the Pines Wild Play area.
• 2012: Introduced guided paddle trips on
the Raquette River and “Planet Adirondack,” a 6-foot interactive Earth, the
first-ever “Science on a Sphere” from National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration [NOAA].
• 2015: Opened the Wild Walk, an
ADA-compliant [Americans with Disabilities Act (1990)] treetop trail.
• 2017: Opened the quarter-mile Forest Music trail featuring 24 “surround-sound” speakers with music by British composer Pete Wyer [b. 1964].
More ‘wild ideas’
When the COVID-19 pandemic closed the 54,000 square-foot building for a year, staff switched gears and opened the Wild Walk that winter and put colored lights in the woods.
Wild Lights is now an annual winter event from late November into February that includes more than 100,000 LED lights, where visitors experience “magic” in the darkness of an Adirondack winter night.
Post-COVID, The Wild Center has accelerated efforts to find new ways to connect people with nature. Artist Patrick Dougherty installed his “Stickwork” sculpture in 2021. Raquette River Roll, the first and only life-sized wooden ball run in North America, opened in 2024 and was expanded in 2025.
2026 will bring six of Thomas Dambo’s massive “Save the Humans” Trolls to the Adirondacks.
Recently, The Wild Center announced plans to build a new Wild Encounters Trail for 2027. This project will upgrade animal habitats that were previously “behind the scenes” but became visitor favorites during the pandemic. The new facility will improve animal health—protecting species from threats like bird flu—while providing better viewing windows for “Animal Ambassadors” that cannot be released back into the wild.
The Wild Center plans to celebrate its 20th anniversary on July 11 with Martin Sexton [b. 1966; singer-songwriter and music producer], who performed at the grand opening in 2006. Other events will include the debut of Carl Heilman II’s new panoramic film, “Wild Adirondacks 2.0,” and hands-on workshops and craft areas.
In the past 20 years, The Wild Center has become more than a museum; it is an economic and educational engine for the North Country, Ratcliffe reflected. “Look at how far we’ve come,” she said. “We are the science museum of the Adirondacks and we’re a real anchor as Tupper Lake redefines itself.”
[Tom French splits his time between the Adirondacks and the Thousand Islands from his home in Potsdam, New York. More by Tom French.
[French was raised on an island in the St. Lawrence River. He received his Bachelor’s degree from St. Lawrence University (’85) in Canton, New York; his Masters from State University of New York at Potsdam (’88), and taught 7th-grade English for over 30 years.
[His book, River Views: A History of the 1000 Islands in 3-D, won a Silver Medal for Best Regional Non-Fiction in the Northeast in the Independent Publishers Book Awards of 2012.
[His work has been featured in Adirondack Explorer, Adirondack Life, Thousand Island Life and many other publications including commentaries on North Country Public Radio. He’s a member of the band The Buoyrockers.
[French spends his winters in Potsdam, where he enjoys skiing, sailing, and volunteering with several Non-Profit Groups. More information about his writing can be found at Tom-French.net.]
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