Demark and Breck have one, why not Austin? Instagram worthy pics coming to Pease Park.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/travel/giant-thomas-dambo-troll-austin-pease-park/
These days, Texans are more likely to encounter trolls on the internet (or at the Capitol) than in a forest or under a bridge. But starting this March, they’ll have a chance to meet the oversized, folkloric kind in Austin’s Pease Park.
Since 2013, Danish artist Thomas Dambo has turned discarded pallets, scrap lumber, and twigs into more than 120 enormous wooden trolls that lurk in parks around the globe. Actually, “lurk” isn’t the best word—these giants are the gentle sort, with friendly faces and Scandinavian charm that have earned them a cult following. The Austin sculpture is Dambo’s first Texas troll, and it’ll occupy a wooded alcove in Pease Park, just northwest of downtown.
The troll will occupy a secluded spot north of the Kingsbury Commons section of the 84-acre public green space. The conservancy worked with city officials to make sure the sculpture, which will remain at the site for at least fifteen years, will have minimal environmental impact. “It’s in a part of the park that gets a lot of use already,” Netherton said.
Funding for the project, which is expected to cost about $350,000, comes solely from private donors. Among them are philanthropists and longtime Austin residents Lynne Dobson and Greg Wooldridge, whose Tejemos Foundation helped pay for a popular tree house at Pease Park. Dobson and Wooldridge proposed bringing a troll to Austin after seeing five of Dambo’s creations at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay, Maine, in August 2022. “I went, ‘Okay, this has to be at Pease,’ ” Dobson said. “This troll has Austin’s personality and playfulness, and we need whimsy and delight in our lives right now.” Approval to build the sculpture came after an extensive community engagement and review process with the city.
But not everyone appreciates Dambo’s trolls, or the crowds they draw. In 2018, a fifteen-foot Dambo troll named Isak Heartstone, built in Breckenridge, Colorado, created a stir when visitors began streaming into the area to snap pictures with the art. Locals complained about traffic and trash. The troll was eventually dismantled (the photos of his decapitation aren’t for the faint of heart) and, happily, reassembled at a permanent home on a trail near the town’s welcome center.
Before approving the Austin project, the conservancy gathered public input from around 1,500 survey respondents. About 85 percent of the feedback was supportive, but a few folks argued that Austin is no place for a Nordic troll. “Shoal Creek is not troll habitat,” read one comment on the conservancy’s Facebook page. “Texas has no cultural tradition of trolls. It makes no sense to plop a troll into Pease Park,” wrote another skeptic, adding that “Pease Park is not a Danish forest.” Others argued that money used to fly Dambo to Austin could be better spent to support local artists struggling to afford the city’s high cost of living.