Note: Authored by David Menconi, this piece has been produced in partnership with Raleigh Arts. Menconi’s latest book, “Oh, Didn’t They Ramble: Rounder Records and the Transformation of American Roots Music,” was published in the fall of 2023 by University of North Carolina Press. His podcast, Carolina Calling, explores the history of the Tar Heel State through music.
When the call went out for volunteers to help with the Dorothea Dix Park troll project, Dix Conservancy anticipated an enthusiastic response. But they were still unprepared for just how many people would want to help build out and install five of internationally renowned artist Thomas Dambo’s troll sculptures in the park.
“You would’ve thought we were selling Taylor Swift tickets,” says Anna-Golden Torres, Dix Coservancy’s senior communications and marketing manager, with a laugh. “When the clock struck noon on the day of volunteer registration, so many people logged on that it crashed the system.”
The resulting five sculptures are scattered across Dix Park, 10 feet and taller in height, and they are magnificent. Of particular note is “Mother Strong Tail,” which has a 645-foot-long tail snaking through the pine grove by Dix’s Flowers Field. The tail is made of barrel staves repurposed from barrels provided by the Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Company.
“We had 17 tons of bourbon barrels, which had to be broken down and reassembled into half-barrels,” says Torres. “By the end of the day, people looked like they’d been in a coal mine, just covered in soot. It was hard work, a lot harder than some of our volunteers were expecting.”
Born in 1979, Dambo’s initial artistic life was as a hip-hop artist with the Danish collective Fler Farver. He also attended design school, gravitating over time toward visual arts as a sculptor whose work “celebrates the intersection of art, nature, storytelling and recycling.”
Trolls are the subject of much lore in Dambo’s native land, and in 2014 he launched a long-running artistic project called “Trail of a Thousand Trolls,” creating sculptures out of repurposed wood and pallets plus fallen tree branches. Thus far, he has installed more than 150 across five continents, each accompanied by storylines crafted by the artist (and rendered in hip-hop verse). Dambo estimates than more than 4.5 million people travel using the Troll Map to discover them each year…