A mother rests, hand on her pregnant belly, a pleased smile on her face.
“She looks sad,” says a young girl, maybe 5 years old.
“I don’t think she looks sad,” says the girl’s mother, her hand on the head of another child, this one toddling after her older sister on plump, unsteady legs. “I think she’s resting.”
“You can’t climb on her,” the five-year-old says, a little wistfully. I think, standing nearby, that it is she who is a little sad.
“No,” the mother agrees, looking up at the massive structure of wood scraps, arranged into the form of a reclining woman. The giant’s feet, propped upright at the end of her outstretched legs, are as tall as the child.
“You can’t climb on her,” the girl repeats.
“No,” reminds the mother. “We don’t want to hurt the baby in her belly.”
“We’ll leave her a flower,” says the girl, and she takes a magnolia bloom offered by her younger sister and stretches up to lay it between the forest giant’s toes.
“She’ll like that,” says the mother, as she begins to guide her children down the path. “Let’s let her relax.”
“Bye!” yells the girl, waving. “I’ll come back to see you!” The forest mother smiles serenely, unmoving.
“You can’t climb her, even if you want to,” the girl informs her little sister, as they trail after their mother down the path and out of sight.
I turn to look at the sculpture, which is as calm and peaceful as the forest where it resides. Her name is Mama Loumari, and within her lore she is the mother of the other two giants here at Bernheim Forest and Arboretum, near Louisville, Kentucky.
Her son Little Nis grins down at his own reflection in one of the Olmsted Ponds; her daughter Little Elina weaves a path of stones that are as large as a person. Neither of them are little.
These giants are the work of Thomas Dambo, a Danish artist and activist who builds large-scale artwork out of recycled materials. He has constructed over 100 forest trolls around the world, using local wood scraps from the communities where the giants live.
The sculptures are captivating, beautiful, and as ephemeral as the materials from which they are made. The large structures are intended to decompose, becoming a part of the forest that birthed them.
The three Bernheim forest giants were constructed in 2019 and are expected to last at least through 2024.
Dambo’s goal is to show the world through his art that beautiful things can be made out of trash.
Standing in front of Mama Loumari, her expression tired but content, like the proud but exhausted mother she must be, I understand the metaphor here: creation is hard but rewarding work.
Building a giant troll in the middle of a forest is not an easy task, nor is collecting the waste materials. And making these wood scraps appear so lifelike that they entrance a child–that is artistry.
And as the cries of another group of children ring out, on their way to stand at the mother’s feet, I think about how they will remember her, long after she has gone back to the earth. And how they may remember her message–that beauty is a matter of perspective, something we can choose to find in a pile of trash.