A shirt. A pair of shorts. A name written inside a collar.

For artist Derick Melander, those ordinary details can become clues to lives he will never know.

He spends much of his studio time sorting through second-hand clothing, handling garments one at a time before carefully folding, arranging and stacking them into large-scale works of art.

Sometimes there is a repair. Sometimes a lingering scent.

“When I’m going through garments and, you know, I can smell someone’s cologne, you know, even though everything’s clean and been washed, you know, it stays there,” Melander said.

The traces can make him imagine the people who once wore the clothes.

“I can imagine what that person’s life might be like a little bit,” he said. “And so it really the, you know, I as I’m going through the garments and and I think, oh and here’s oh here’s someone’s like go-go dancer, you know.”

For Melander, the garments begin to feel less like discarded objects and more like fragments of memory.

“Every single garment has a story,” he said. “And it really starts to feel alive to me.”

That idea has been at the center of Melander’s work for about 25 years. He has folded and stacked more than 10 tons of second-hand clothing, transforming individual garments into geometric sculptures, columns and walls.

His newest exhibition, This Is Where I Leave You, at Hall Space in Eldred, brings together work spanning roughly two decades. The exhibition includes sculpture, video, mixed media, paintings, drawings and an interactive piece.

Melander says clothing wasn’t originally supposed to become the defining material of his artistic practice.

After graduating from the School of Visual Arts, he was working on a project involving metal suitcases and struggling with how to display them.

“I was like do I put it on the wall? No. Do I put it on a white pedestal?” he recalled.

Then he thought about what naturally belongs inside a suitcase. Clothes.

He began using folded and stacked second-hand clothing as a base for the sculpture. The more he worked with it, the more possibilities he found.

When visitors first encounter some of the work, they may not even realize what they are seeing.

“People will often gasp is that clothing?” he said.

Then, as they move closer, individual patterns can trigger their own memories.

“They see, oh you know that plaid there that’s that my my grandfather had a flannel shirt just like that,” Melander said.

The work also points toward a much larger problem: what happens to all the clothing people no longer want.

Melander says the sheer volume of discarded clothing has forced ecology into his artistic practice.

“When I started showing the clothing in mass where I have a piece that weighs a ton and a half and it’s just solid clothing, you cannot avoid a conversation about ecology,” he said.

The exhibition’s opening reception is Saturday, Sept. 5, at 4 p.m. Melander will also hold an artist talk, slideshow and Q&A on Sept. 20 from 4 to 6 p.m.