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Katharine Miele
Candidacy Review
Spring 2020
If Walls Could Talk
I’m on my lunch break. I’m driving to Chick-Fil-A. I’m following my phone’s GPS as it
takes me through neighborhoods that I only set foot in to attend parties thrown by friends from
Georgia State University back in 2009. This is the first time during the day, however, and it’s
eight years later. I have a general idea about where I am: somewhere near the Olympic Torch and
what was previously the Braves Stadium. After the baseball team moved up to Cobb county,
Georgia State purchased the field. I pull the car over immediately and stop as I turn on the
emergency flashers. I’m getting out to take photos of something that caught my eye. There’s a
pile of someone’s belongings, stacked precariously on the strip of grass in between the sidewalk
and the curb. They’re covered in leaves, mildew, and pollen, and they look like they’ve been
rained on many times. I can’t look away. I walk around it trying to get the best, photo angle of
the Midcentury Modern armchair that’s missing its back cushion. I am embarrassed as a man
walking on the opposite sidewalk calls to me, “Are you gonna’ haul all that stuff away?” “No,” I
replied, aghast that he would assume I’d steal someone’s property in such a brutish way. “Just
documenting.”
It took many years for me to realize my privilege, my demographic, and the hand, that
my own existence played in this scenario. Years to realize my guilt for the parties I attended in
houses that were once owned by the speaker’s neighbors, used and abused, as renters threw
parties in the once quiet neighborhoods (On one particularly ruckus night, the back porch, unable
to bear the weight of party-goers, fell off the house). I was on my way, at the time of the event
we first discussed, to a brand new strip-mall in Inman Park area. I don’t recall what the land was
before (probably just trees), but it became a fancy Kroger with Starbucks inside and a Chick-Fil-
A with two drive-through lanes. Completely in contrast to the apartment complexes to the right
and across the street, but perfectly and aesthetically aligned to the new mixed-use condos to the
left with retail shops and restaurants on the ground floor. This person, or family, whose
belongings were laid bare outside a house they once called home but could not return to had been
evicted. And here I was, frivolously spending money on fast food to support the new
development and these people couldn’t afford to live in their home anymore.
Why? Why is this happening to people? Eviction is the symptom of something I’ve
fought to uncover for many years. Gentrification, urban progress, immanent domain, misuse of
money, mental health issues, poor building materials, etc. Whatever you decide to call it, or how
you like to justify and waive away, or ignore the root problem; the fact is that people are being
evicted from their homes. It is up to you to decide if the methods employed to undertake these
evictions are morally right or wrong; or if you choose to side with the tenant or the landlord. As
I’ve floundered about searching for answers, I’ve come aware of many people, even in my inner
circle, who stand in stark contrast to my own beliefs: people who think that “urban renewal” is
good, it benefits everyone, and racism has nothing to do with it. I’ve discovered that this
argument, while important to continue dialog, cannot be won. It is as partisan as the next
presidential election. However, the role I am taking is a result of the guilt that I feel. It’s
happening, and we need to know about it. I will shine the spotlight, illuminating the effects, and
then you can decide how you want to feel about it.
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A home is a container for conversations, experiences, rituals, habits, and mundanity. It is

a container of your days. It’s a vessel of safety and the provider of our most basic, primal need:
shelter. Even after moving away, we revisit the rooms in our dreams, recollection, and in
anecdotes we tell while sitting in the new rooms of our new homes. There is only one home to
which I return in dreams, it’s the home in which my parents still reside. I can not image the loss I
would feel if suddenly, and without warning, this house was no longer ours. I don’t want to
imagine someone else living in it, or even worse: the house being demolished to rebuild a new
McMansion over top of its remains. The life it once facilitated, permeating spectrally through the
newly poured foundations. And yet, I see this happening everywhere in my city. The city of
Atlanta, where I was born. I take pride in being from Atlanta, as so many people who call it
home are transplants. I’ve seen it change and grow, and I haven’t just heard stories about the
Olympics, I was there. I walked the Beltline when it was still an overgrown railroad with
abandoned buildings lining the tracks. I attended events at the Georgia Dome before it was
demolished to become a parking lot for the Mercedes Benz stadium that was constructed directly
next to it. As a child, I ran through the Olympic Ring fountains in Centennial Park before the
Aquarian, the (new) Coke Museum, and the College Football Hall of Fame, the Skyview Ferris
Wheel, and the Civil Rights Museum were built. As a witness to the events, I have agency to
document the changes and provide visual evidence for the implications they have on residents.
These implications become quickly apparent when entire contents of homes are stacked
haphazardly outside. When I come across a pile at the site of an eviction, I stop my car to get out
and conduct my research. I enjoy the adventure and risk of exploration. Fences used to be
barriers but now I just see them as obstacles to be climbed. Furthermore, I attempt to understand
the people anthropologically through the objects left behind (their choices, ergonomics, lifestyle,
style preferences, etc.). Furniture pieces are the best examples as they hold the most residue. The
patterns of wear on their surfaces, developed by overuse, offers a history to be interpreted. The
vessel (a chair as a container for a person) itself becomes more than its objectivity and magnifies
the story it tells. The patterns tell a story that never ends, a narrative without a conclusion or
resolution. I tell the stories these chairs convey to me in a process I describe as portraiture. My
works, “Memphis Milano” and “Atlanta Prison Farm” are both embroidered with simplified
colors that represent the type of decay present in the moment I photograph them. Sometimes that
is mold, moss, patina, etc. More specifically, the colors of “APF” are aligned to a color pallet
created for the glass sculpture, “Pillow,” and are used again in the “Atlanta Map.” The colors
embody a reclining chair from that late 80’s, owned by the paternal grandmother who I never
met, was despised by my father, and whose memorial slowly decays as the chair remains in use
within their house. Embroidery is best way to monumentalize these objects because it allows me
to pour hours into their creation. Instead of depicting them in their pristine, fresh-out-of-the-
packaging state, their wear and use are conveyed by the analog care taken to create each stich in
the portraits. They become a point of memorial that allows the viewer a place to return. Like a
gravestone, the physical object imbibes its spectral experiences as the original chairs find their
way to dumps and continue to deteriorate.
The glass sculptures, “Pillow,” and “Throw” index soft, comforting, domestic objects but
in hard, sharp, and even dangerous form. On the other hand, the use of Tiffany stained glass
traditionally refers to sanctuary or a safe space. The duality of their formal qualities represents
the moment in time when the homeowner, is no longer a homeowner. The locks are changed, and
the physical and emotional boundaries of home are broken. You (as personified by your
possessions) are inside but you (in bodily form) are outside looking in. The spaces or thresholds
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between the shards of glass in the sculpture allow the refraction and temporality of light in its
atmospheric positions to simulate the crossing or breaking of barriers and the actual fragility of
the domestic safe space. The use of geometric shapes and lines speak to the architecture of the
glass sculpture and connect it to its cyanotype counterpart. The cyanotype printing process
captures the shadows of the glass sculpture in varied stages of the sculpture’s assemblage. The
enigmatic lines of the blueprints appear as the memory or an archival record of the generative
architectural glass ruin. This challenges their purpose because, typically blueprints are composed
fist to inform the construction of a structure. Rather the monoprints are derivative of the glass
and thus are archives of the structure and all it communicates: the spectral and ghostly presence
of the home.
On the backside of the embroidered portraits are hundreds of threads crisscrossing,
dotting, overlapping, intersecting, and stopping abruptly. In short, they are maps. What is being
mapped is not streets and commercial buildings, but rather pedestrian experiences in the place.
Place can be interpreted abstractly as if the chair depicted on the reverse is traversable
topography or the chair is a proxy for the place from which it came. The “Atlanta Map” on the
other hand, is embroidered with altered intentions. While the map continues to use colors that
facilitate the familial association I have with the city, it is devoid of residential buildings. The
grid system inherent in maps creates the look of a subterranean network of ant tunnels: absent of
logic and responding to instinct. On the reverse, private side of the map, there are thousands of
threads as if they were deer paths in a dense forest, or short cuts directly related to the use of the
city that fail to be analyzed by satellite view. The dense, unused space (officially used as
residential area) in “Atlanta Map” is Utopia. Imagine if the map was sewn by someone who
never went outside to see the city. Unable to understand “city,” she sat at her table and
embroidered it, but never actually saw or explored it. A city without people is like a body of
veins missing their bloodflow.
Mapmaking has recently entered my practice, and thus there is still much to be explored
within cartography. In my work going forward, I am encouraging the surfaces of an embroidered
piece to take on a skin-like, upholstered quality to evoke the body as metaphor for furniture,
architecture, and maps. All the while, it is imperative for any of my works to encompass a
rigorous process and time to situate themselves in tandem with the objects they depict that need
time to reach fermentation.
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Memphis Milano, Front & Back

Install View of “Pillow” + Cyanotype Counterpart

Atlanta Prison Farm

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Install Images of “Throw”

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Untitled (Atlanta Map) Front & Back