Pease Park will soon get an 18-foot-tall wooden troll sculpture. But ahead of its opening, Austinites can find a similar (if slightly more disheveled) troll at a miniature park just a few blocks away.
“When I heard that the Pease Park was going to be installing that incredible troll as part of a big, large art project, I thought, ‘Well, BEPI Park needs to have its own troll as well,’” Gary Schumann, the caretaker of BEPI Park, told KUT.
West Austin’s BEPI Park is a 50-square-foot traffic median at the intersections of Baylor, Enfield and Parkway roads. After the City of Austin installed the median in front of Schumann’s house seven years ago for pedestrian safety, he took over its landscaping — and gave it a bit of a cheeky personality.
BEPI Park has been a mini-golf course, a Squid Game-inspired holiday display, a community vegetable garden and even an active volcano. Now, it’s a wild troll that Schumann imagines as a perfect companion for the bigger one down the street.
The Pease Park troll is the latest project of Danish artist Thomas Dambo, who has built more than 100 trolls across the world using local, recycled materials. Construction is currently underway on the trail just north of Kingsbury Commons and will finish on March 15.
Schumann took inspiration from Dambo’s designs to build the BEPI Park troll, also leaning on recycled materials. Scrap wood from an old chicken coop makes up much of the face and body, and a barrel from a Hill Country winery serves as the troll’s torso. The arms and legs are branches from a crepe myrtle tree. All in all, Schumann said the troll stands about 12 feet tall.
“I think my troll is very Austinite,” he said. “All the different parts of it are just very local, and things that speak to Austin.”
Schumann spent about three days building the BEPI Park troll and installed it with his friends overnight on Saturday, in the hopes of surprising parkgoers Sunday morning. The troll will stay at BEPI Park for around three months.
Even though the Pease Park and BEPI Park trolls have a lot in common, they diverge in personality, Schumann said.
“The Pease Park troll is up in the woods, and it's very peaceful and tranquil,” he said. “Whereas my troll is out in the middle of this busy street, and it's gesticulating wildly. And what I'm telling people it's saying is, ‘Slow down, slow down!’ It's like a cranky, crazy old man in the middle of the street, waving his arms at the traffic.”
After all, opposites attract. And yes, Schumann envisions the two trolls as more than friends.
“The Pease Park troll is a lady troll, and our troll is a man troll,” he said. “Maybe they'll get together at Pease Park and hook up and have troll babies. I told my husband that, and he said he thought that was weird.”
The seeds of a relationship have already been planted. The Pease Park Conservancy has already complimented the BEPI Park troll on Facebook.
In the age of social media, that’s basically a declaration of love.
