Ocean State Welcomes its Latest Celebrity Residents: Trolls
Danish artist Thomas Dambo has built 171 giant troll sculptures to date out of recycled wood scraps and hid them in natural settings around the world. In 2025, the tiny Ocean State grew its oversized troll population to five.
By Lisa Watts
Louise Bishop was stuck in Newark airport in the fall of 2019, waiting to fly home to Rhode Island. Leafing through magazines, she spotted a full-page ad featuring Hector the Protector, the thirty-ninth supersized troll built by Danish artist Thomas Dambo from recycled wood. Hector sits perched on rocks, looking out to sea, determined to protect the tiny Puerto Rico island of Culebro.
Bishop has served as president and CEO of South County Tourism Council since 2016. With a background in art along with destination marketing, she is keen to bring public art to her region, especially large-scale pieces by everyone from local to globally known artists. Dambo’s work perfectly matched South County’s zeitgeist, she says—mindful of the environment, honoring the sea and landscapes, and family friendly.
Bishop texted a screenshot of the magazine ad to her creative director with a note, “These trolls need to come to Rhode Island!” Six years later, thanks to “amazing” collaborations across the state, five whimsical supersized Dambo trolls live in Rhode Island: two in Ninigret Park in Charlestown, one in Ryan Park in North Kingstown, one in Arcadia State Park in Hope Valley, and one beside Kettle Point Pier in East Providence.
At their first meeting in 2020, Bishop and Dambo flew in a helicopter over Ninigret Park to help the artist identify potential sites while learning about the region’s geological history. Bishop chose Ninigret because the 227-acre park, a former World War II airfield, offered ample space but didn’t have much to draw visitors. Charlestown’s town manager, the town council, parks department, and others responded quickly to the idea. “They were amazing, they absolutely embraced the plans,” she says of her colleagues. “They opened the door immediately.” Rhode Island Commerce, the state’s economic development agency, offered two $50,000 sponsorship grants for the project. Following pandemic delays, Bishop and her team brought Dambo and his team back to Ninigret in the spring of 2024 to create Greta Granit and Erik Rock.
The Erik Rock Troll in Ninigret Park. Photo courtesy of Caroline Stevens
“A highly, highly creative individual whose mind works very fast,” is how Bishop describes Dambo. When her team put out a call for help with site clearing and material gatherings, the volunteer slots filled immediately with a mix of locals but also folks from out of state. Dambo has avid followers by the hundreds of thousands, some of whom travel globally to visit the trolls and pitch in. When one volunteer discovered piles of bamboo in Charlestown, he brought a few pieces to show Dambo. Soon the artist had volunteers cutting and splitting 200 sticks of bamboo to form strands of hair that make up Greta’s ponytail, one of the troll’s more distinctive features.
Dambo and his team returned to Rhode Island this past August to build Young Boulder in Arcadia, Iver Mudslider in Ryan Park, and Mrs. Skipper just off the East Bay Bike Path at Kettle Point Pier. Building these last three trolls was funded by Placemaking Initiative grants from RI Commerce to the South County and Blackstone Valley tourism councils totalling $465,000.
Bishop continues to collaborate with Dambo on a statewide troll story in which each of the five Ocean State trolls will hold a piece of a puzzle that, when combined, reveals clues to a legendary “Thunderstone,” a mythical object described in Dambo’s lore as a hardened mountain peak. The mythical story will encourage visitors to explore all five trolls across the state and other sites while connecting more with the natural environment.
“Thomas is drawn to Rhode Island because of our stone and rock formations. They are unique for him, they don’t exist in Denmark,” says Ross Lippman, former arts and culture producer for Ocean State Media who spent time filming Dambo and his team in spring 2024. “He’s drawn to properties where he can tell layered stories.”
photo courtesy of Ocean State Media
Lifelong Dumpster Diver, Guerilla Artist
It is a Sunday afternoon in late August 2025. Thomas Dambo bounds out on the auditorium stage at East Providence High School rapping, in his Danish accent, about trash and garbage. He is dressed in an oversized striped polo shirt, baggy khaki pants, sneakers, and a khaki bucket hat. He appears boyish, far younger than his forty-seven years, and as playful as the quirky characters he is building around the world.
Dambo has been a dumpster diver all his life, he tells the audience in East Providence for his artist talk. Growing up in Odense, Denmark, he’d tag along with his dad to the local dump and spot treasures like a plastic window he could add to his treehouse back home. Taking things from the dump was illegal so his father would park his bike-shop van where it blocked the scavengers’ activity from the dump official’s windows.
As a teen and college student Dambo wrote and performed rap music and dabbled in graffiti and other forms of guerilla art, often dodging local law enforcement. A light-bulb moment hit him when he started building hundreds of small birdhouses from recycled scrap wood. He painted them in bright colors with discarded paints and hung them around cities from Denmark to Germany and beyond. One day he was perched in an urban tree hanging a few birdhouses when policemen walked by below him. They looked up and asked if he was responsible for the bird houses. Busted, Dambo figured. Instead the policemen handed him a banana and chocolate milk. Lesson learned: Guerilla art is OK if you make art that people actually like.
After creating a few giant, playful installations out of plastic to highlight environmental concerns, Dambo turned to wood. He built his first troll on the Danish island of Mors in 2014. Initially he planned to create animals, he said, but he realized he wouldn’t be able to get their proportions right with his materials — which include used pallets, whiskey barrels, and other wood scraps. In the dozen years since, Danbo has built 171 trolls and counting around the globe, on every continent except Africa.
Mrs. Skipper. Photo courtesy of Deirdre Bird
‘Stay a while and enjoy the view’
Mrs. Skipper, Dambo’s most ambitious troll in Rhode Island, is built on rocks overlooking the Providence River in East Providence.The city’s mayor, Robert DaSilva, toured a few potential sites with the artist. As soon as they stood beside the Kettle Point Pier, Dambo’s eyes lit up—he immediately pictured a troll sitting on the rocks, holding a large boat overhead, DaSilva says. His Department of Public Works team pitched in with timely engineering work and permits to build the steel framework that secures Mrs. Skipper and her boat on the rocks. In keeping with his recycling ethos, Dambo purchased the weathered 28-foot lifeboat for $500 through a Facebook Marketplace listing in the Boston area. Most of her body is built from bourbon barrels; she sports a charm necklace including sea glass “jewels.”
Mrs. Skipper has brought unprecedented numbers of visitors to the Kettle Point Pier, just off the popular East Bay Bike Path, DaSilva says. He visits the troll to check on his city’s continuing improvements to the area, from installing a few picnic tables to clearing brush along a bluff overlooking the pier. Future planned improvements include a gazebo, ADA accessible paths, a wider walkway and proper pedestrian crossing across the bike path, and solar lighting for evenings.
“I want people to come visit the troll, then stay a while and enjoy the view,” DaSilva says. He is biased, certainly, but he believes the troll’s perch beside the fishing pier where oil tankers once tied up to unload is one of the most unique sites in Rhode Island, including its view of the Providence skyline looking north up the river. “I love the mixture of nature and industry, how part of the area is rustic and natural and then you can look across the water at the industrial areas. You have to come at night, when all the lights of the industrial areas reflect back on Mrs. Skipper.”
Commerce hasn’t shared tourism data for 2025 but the agency recently reported that a record 29.4 million visitors came to the state in 2024 (a 3.5 percent increase from 2023) and spent $6 billion while they were here. Bishop suspects the 2025 visitor numbers will set another record. “The trolls have had an enormous impact on our hotels and tourism,” she says. This past fall, after the peak tourism months of July and August, visitor numbers “skyrocketed,” she says. “We’ve not experienced a shoulder season this strong, bringing our year-over-year numbers up by 16.9 percent” — growth that she mostly attributes to the new trolls.
Dambo knows that each of his trolls won’t last forever. Eventually they will rot, decay, and return to the earth. It’s a big part of why he likes working with wood: “It grows, then it decomposes,” he has said. “As a recycling artist, why should I build sculptures that last forever?”
It’s another reason why his trolls and their message of reuse, recycling, and reducing consumption should resonate with Rhode Islanders. The state’s sole landfill is quickly running out of space; estimates say it will reach capacity within the next twenty years. Globally, “the world is running out of resources while it’s drowning in trash,” Dambo says. “I choose to spend my life showing the world that beautiful things can be made out of trash.”
Dambo By the Numbers:
“As Thomas’ sculptures have become more popular, tourism departments, parks and recs, and governments can see that his sculptures can be used for tourism draws and placemaking efforts,” says Alexa Piekarski, Dambo’s spokesperson. “Our most recent estimate is that four to five million people globally have stood in front of his sculptures in the last 12 months.”
Since building his first troll in 2014, Dambo counts:
171 trolls and counting
10-22 staff based outside of Copenhagen
35,000 volunteers
12 million visitors and counting
Going Deeper into Dambo
Explore the interactive Trollmap on Dambo’s website (thomasdambo.com)
In the spring of 2024 Ross Lippman, then the arts and culture producer for Ocean State Media, filmed Danbo and his team as they built Greta Granit and Erik Rock in Ninigret Park. The video that Lippman produced won a Boston/New England Regional Emmy in the arts/entertainment category in June 2025.