Used wooden pallets and used wine barrels are being cut up, shaped and positioned to create a unique art exhibit: a large and rather whimsical troll!
"My trolls are big and they're made of recycled wood," explains artist Thomas Dambo. "And this troll here is made with the old broken wine barrels. It's made with pallets and it's made with branches and sticks from a couple of ranches in the nearby area. And then it's made with the help from over 50 local volunteers."
Dambo is Danish himself and what better home for his installation than this Danish city in the Santa Ynez Valley?
"It's a funny little Danish city here and so I thought, why don't have a little troll here or a little really big troll inside this fairytale whimsy tower that is here?," said Dambo.
"Trolls have been used to tell many different stories through the last thousands of years, and they can both be good and evil. And that's also how it is with my trolls. They're good if you're good to nature and your surroundings, and they are bad if you are bad," he said.
"There's 150 of them, they're all over the world. And in my stories, the trolls are the voice of the plants and the animals and the protectors of the natural world," he explained.
The troll has got one giant hand pushing away the room's ceiling and she’s bending her neck to fit. She has twigs for hair, and bark for eyebrows - one of which is pierced by a car tire. She has wooden teeth and a kindly smile. From outside in the street, she’s visible through the windows, and—says Stacey Otte-Demangate, Executive Director of the California Nature Museum—is a very exciting addition.
"Thomas is an international artist. He is Danish. And of course, Solvang is the Danish capital of America. So from that perspective, great fit," said Otte-Demangate. "He's all about getting people out into nature and caring about recycling and sustainability."
"I'm excited that we have a girl because I do feel like they're a little less common and she's kind of squeezed herself into our tower. She's so fun and watching it evolve over the last two weeks has been amazing," she said.
Built from recycled materials, Dambo says the troll is more than just something fun to look at—it's also a chance to think about our waste and breathe new life into discarded resources.
"That's the perspective that I want people to remember when they put stuff out. What is the possibility of it? Because we could obviously also build cities and we could build the future of our world out of our trash instead of having the future be suffocated from the leftovers of our commercial civilization right now. So that's what I want people to take away," said Dambo.
California Nature Art Museum is open weekdays 11am – 4 pm (except Tuesday and Wednesday) and weekends 10am – 5pm.
