An Interview with Troll Artist Thomas Dambo

[Music] my parents they told me about being good stewards and leaving the world a better better place than when we enter it and I went through a like a like a special school in the country it'd be great that had a house like a playhouse a fortress or something like that that they could build up over the backyard next to the then there were some cows and a horse and some chickens and then everybody had a house you know and so I could just go and get a saw and a hammer and some nails and some and then some old boards in the in between classes and then go and build on it and climb all the way up on it or something like that I think Americans would will be like what that is crazy you know but but that's in Denmark we trust that the kids they should learn and to hurt themselves and learn to fall because that's how you learn to keep your balance basically so that really taught me about building things and not being afraid of building anything and that I could just take anything inside my mind and I would make it come to life I was making another type of sculptures they were like more made of plywood and painted but when you paint something that's made of trash and has holes and dents and cracks in it because it was something before screw holes and nuts and whatever then you really see those cracks when you paint it so you paint it light blue or pink or something like that and you really see those things so I thought like I should try and make a aesthetic for a sculpture where the broken material is supposed to look broken rather than try and cover it up and then that's why the fur is made of small pieces and and that so that was like some of the ideas behind it and then like the bigger concept of it is like that I wanted to do something that shows how much trash we have you also do it so that it's a it's interacting with the cityscape you know maybe there's a sign that says police and then you turn it into saying ice cream truck or something like that you know like so you'll hack the cityscape and and so and I kind of like do the same now right right my my troll here is like it's playing with us humans as puppets and it's also playing with the world we live in [Music] here in the United States there is all the the nation the people are present and the the country is built on their land right so I think it makes good sense to involve them in the project and so we've done a quick effort to do that and so we had a lady from this necromish tribe who had made the headband in Cedar Park that's like weaved into this met so that's kind of like instead of a little rubber band it's got like this big hair paint made of the Cedar Park [Music] here it's called where the bird king it's 10 sculptures 5 000 miles from New Jersey and then all the way to here in Issaquah and then we have another one in in Bastion and we're like the furthest west we'll go and it's around 100 days we've been on the road now but it's been a journey [Music] I have a map called trollmap.com or on my website summerstable.com and there you can find all the 125 different sculptures that I've made in 17 different countries all around the world foreign [Music]

Channel: City of Issaquah

Views: 2,867

Keywords: Issaquah

Id: _NgITOgfxH8

Length: 3min 48sec (228 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 12 2023