Starting October 15, something enormous will be watching from the woods at Northwest Trek Wildlife Park. Eight giant trolls, each one hand-built from fallen branches, scrap wood, pallets and twigs, will be tucked along the park's forested trails and natural habitat areas, peering out from behind trees and rising up from the underbrush. They are the work of Thomas Dambo, the Danish artist. The exhibition, titled "Trolls: A Field Study," runs through January 24, 2027, and is included with general admission. Four more trolls are installed across town at Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium, bringing the total to twelve across the two Pierce County parks.
The premise is a bit of a joke, and Dambo means it that way. The trolls, in the loose mythology he has invented for them, are not there to be found so much as to observe. They have emerged from the forest to study the humans wandering through it. "They're just walking right out of the forest," Nikki Dzialowy, Northwest Trek's facilities manager, told KOMO News. "They live here. They thrive here. And now, they're showing themselves just a little bit to study us." It is a neat inversion of the usual zoo arrangement, where visitors do the looking. Here, at least in spirit, the looking goes both ways.
One of the eight sculptures sits inside the park's Free-Roaming Area, the 435-acre expanse where bison, elk and other native Northwest wildlife wander. Visitors can reach that troll by tram, by driving their own vehicle on the park's Wild Drive tour, or on a Keeper Adventure Jeep tour. The rest are scattered along the walking paths, some easy to spot, others deliberately hidden among the trees. The park, a 723-acre wildlife refuge near Eatonville, has always been built around the idea of moving through habitat rather than past it. The trolls fit that logic. They are, in Dambo's telling, part of the forest rather than dropped into it.
That is the whole point of the material. Dambo, who describes himself as a "recycle art activist," has built his career on the conviction that discarded things still hold value. He grew up in Odense, Denmark, a kid with ADHD and a lot of energy, sent by his parents to what he has called "a little hippie school in the country," where each grade had a wooden house students could scavenge supplies for and add onto in their spare time. He has been building at scale ever since. His trolls have appeared in the United States, Puerto Rico, China, South Korea and across Europe, and he has scattered more than 180 of them around the world. He often pedals a flatbed tricycle and raps about dumpster diving. "There're a lot of artists that make cool sculptures," he told KOMO. "So, why is it that they like mine? I think it's just because it's basic human needs: go outside and enjoy nature. We're all trapped inside this digital box, right?"
His method is a treasure hunt. Since 2014, when he began constructing the colossal figures out of salvaged wood, Dambo has treated the search itself as the artwork. He publishes maps and drops clues on social media, and the journey to find a troll is meant to be the best part. Each sculpture gets a name, a distinct face and a backstory. Some have hair made of twigs. Some wear nose rings. Some grin. In Denmark, one of his earliest series, the Six Forgotten Giants, hid six trolls in the green spaces around Copenhagen, and the project turned into a citywide scavenger hunt. The Pacific Northwest already knows the feeling. Five of Dambo's earlier trolls took up residence around the region in 2023 as part of a project called "Northwest Trolls: Way of the Bird King" — Bruun Idun in West Seattle's Lincoln Park, singing to the orcas of the Salish Sea; Pia the Peacekeeper on Bainbridge Island; Jakob Two Trees in the Issaquah forest; others in Ballard and on Vashon Island, plus Ole Bolle at Portland's Nordic Northwest. Those sculptures were built from recycled material and from things gathered locally: fir branches, driftwood, moss, shells, cedar and apple branches.
The new exhibition is a traveling one. "Trolls: A Field Study" previously appeared at the North Carolina Arboretum and is currently at the South Coast Botanic Garden in California before its stop in Pierce County, which makes Northwest Trek and Point Defiance the first locations in the Pacific Northwest to host this particular show. It is produced by Imagine, the art-installation company, in partnership with Dambo. "Imagine is delighted to partner with Thomas Dambo to bring his imaginative vision of 'Trolls: A Field Study' to life," the company's president and CEO, Tom Zaller, said in a release. "We're excited to collaborate with Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium and Northwest Trek Wildlife Park on this one-of-a-kind exhibition that offers guests an enchanting outdoor experience."
Matt Mauer, president of the Parks Tacoma Board of Commissioners, framed the arrival in similar terms. "We're always looking for new ways to connect people with nature, wildlife and the outdoors," he said. The exhibition's title suggests the educational angle is deliberate: a field study, in the scientific sense, is what you do when you go out and observe something in its own environment. Dambo's trolls have simply reversed who is doing the observing.
For anyone planning a visit, a few practical notes. The dates October 15 through January 24 represent the full exhibition period, not daily opening hours, so it is worth checking the park's operating calendar before making the drive. Admission to the trolls is covered by general admission, and the four companion sculptures at Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium in Tacoma are included the same way, so a single trip can take in both halves of the installation. Northwest Trek sits about 40 miles from the Nisqually entrance to Mount Rainier National Park, which makes the troll hunt an easy addition to a fall or winter run up toward the mountain.
There is something fitting about the setting. Northwest Trek is a place built around animals that live in the open, and Dambo's trolls are made almost entirely of things the forest and the city had finished with — branches that fell, pallets that were discarded, wood that had already served a purpose. They will stand among the bison and the elk for a season, watching the people who come to watch everything else. Then they will move on, as the exhibition has moved on before, and the forest will go back to being just a forest.