Derick Melander at Friends Academy from Derick Melander on Vimeo.
In today's day and age, T-shirts are about as common as water or wine, though they're not consumed as rapidly--thank goodness. Contrastingly, T-shirts are often worn and re-worn over a period of many years. But what happens to a tee once it's been worn thin or once its 'cool-ness' has become outdated?
Some T-shirts, sadly, end up in landfills. In fact, according to Patagonia, which offers an apparel recycling program called Common Threads, "The population of the United States discards 11.9 million tons of clothing, shoes and textiles per year." Scary as that sounds, it may be comforting to know that some people donate old tees to second hand clothing stores, which keeps them out of the fill. Still yet, there's another--albeit less common and far less expected--place for T-shirts to end up--in works of art.
This route may not be the one most used tees take, considering that there seems to be just one artist in the U.S. making sculptures out of used apparel. Regardless, it's one of the coolest places for an old T-shirt to go. New York artist Derick Melander specializes in creating sculptures out of second hand T-shirts and apparel. As you'll see in the video above, one of his most public works was a sculpted design created in the library of a school with the help of its students. Together, he and the students meticulously folded, color-coded and stacked the items to create a vibrant sculpture that marked the entryway of the library. In this case, the students themselves also donated the clothing that was placed into the piece of art. As a result, Melander says this about the finished piece: "It's essentially a portrait of them or a representation of them, which is really one of the core things I'm trying to get across with these pieces, that the garments all carry a trace of the people who wore them... "
To learn more about the artist, check out his bio here. To see more works of art containing tees, look here.
