LOCALadk Magazine

LOCALadk 26 Something is nestled into the trees. You don't see it. Not at first, at least. The trail on The Wild Center's 115-acre campus in Tupper Lake winds through the Adirondack forest — white birch and red spruce pressing close, the Raquette River bab- bling somewhere out of sight. Then a child up ahead stumbles upon it. They stop cold, point, and the thing takes shape: two enormous feet protruding from be- tween the trees, a rough-hewn face, and a body con- structed from salvaged old pallet wood. The whimsical sculpture appears fifteen feet tall, maybe more, and made entirely from what someone else threw away. This is the world that Danish artist Thomas Dambo has spent more than a decade building — one discard- ed plank at a time, on six continents, in the forests and parks and overlooked green spaces of more than twenty countries. This summer, that world arrives in the Adirondacks. TROLLS: Save the Humans, a trav- eling exhibition featuring six of Dambo's signature reclaimed wood giants, opens at The Wild Center on June 1, 2026, running through October 31. The timing is no accident: The Wild Center is celebrating its 20th anniversary, and the trolls carry a message that this particular landscape has been wrestling with for well over a century. The man who hears what trash is saying Thomas Dambo was born in 1979 in Odense, Den- mark, to a mother who worked as a seamstress and a father who was a blacksmith. He grew up in a house- hold where resourcefulness and creativity thrived. You built your own toys. You repaired rather than replaced. You looked at the materials around you and imagined them into something else. Dambo spent his childhood digging caves, stringing zip lines between trees, and constructing elaborate treehouses from whatever was at hand. He carried that spirit into an eclectic early career— rapper, beatboxer, graffiti artist, graduate of the Kolding Design School with a master's degree in inter- active design. But it was the deep, stubborn question that had shadowed him since childhood — what do we owe the natural world? — that eventually pulled all of it together. Around 2014, he began what he now calls the "Trail of a Thousand Trolls," placing enormous sculptures made from reclaimed wood in forests and parks where people would have to seek them out. By mid-2025, he and his team had built more than 170, with roughly 25 new ones added each year. His self-description is unpretentious: he calls him- self a "garbage artist" and a "recycle art activist," and owns freely to what he calls a "hoarder disorder." But Trash, Treasure, and the Trees By Nick Gunn

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