food,fiber, fun

Chef Kiki Aranita Creates Yarn Sculptures Of Childhood Snacks

ARTICLE BY EMILY TRUONG PHOTOS BY KIKI ARANITA

What crosses your mind when you’re out at the grocery store or gas station or nearest Wawa, scanning the snack aisle for your favorite bag of chips? The packaging, once you’ve consumed its contents, is just trash, isn’t it? Nothing too important or to pay much attention to, just something to throw away later. But to Kiki Aranita, it’s so much more.

The Philly-based fiber artist (and chef, food writer, and owner of Poi Dog) takes inspiration from food packaging — the bags, wrappers, boxes, bottles, and tins that hold our favorite snacks, sauces, and other foods — sculpting recreations of them out of yarn. If you happened to have flown in or out of Terminal B in the Philadelphia International Airport earlier this year (where her “Yarned Snacks, Sauces and Tins” series was featured in a solo exhibition), you might’ve been lucky enough to see her work in person.

A few years back, Aranita’s best friend taught her to crochet — but only how to do one stitch (the single crochet stitch, which, arguably, is one of the most versatile stitches to learn, but nonetheless, still one stitch). Yet, her knowledge of only that one stitch hasn’t stopped her from creating her yarn sculptures: “[It’s] the only way that I know how to sculpt things.”

Toward the beginning of the pandemic, Aranita started crocheting bunnies — “like, lots and lots of bunnies.” They quickly took over her house, and she began her first series, titled “Buntheogony” — a collection of Greek gods and mythological figures in bunny form, inspired by her time in graduate school studying classics and her lifelong love of bunnies. “I know this sounds crazy,” Aranita laughs, “but it was 2020. It was, like, anything goes.”

Soon though, surrounded by brightly colored, sometimes multi-headed, sometimes slightly gory bunnies, and unable to travel or get ahold of some of her favorite snacks, Aranita shifted toward crocheting the food that she missed. “I missed a lot of food,” Aranita says. “I missed going back to my homes. You grow up with certain snacks, and you miss them, and in 2020 there was a lot of stuff you couldn’t get.”

Armed with her crochet hook and scrap bits of yarn from friends, family, and her local buy nothing group, she started creating yarned versions of the packaging of her favorite foods. Aranita’s mother was a graphic designer, and from an early age, she developed a love of packaging — the fonts, the colors, the branding. Everything about it interested her. “I think about fonts all the time,” she says. “Like, why do we look at a certain font and think, ‘Oh, wow, I love that. I identify with that’?”

Breaking down the fonts and other design elements of Spam, Maltesers, or Gin Mayo — picking apart the packaging and figuring out why and how it works — and then rendering them as fiber art fascinated her. Her yarn sculptures aren’t quite replications, though. “To me, these are 3D objects,” Aranita explains. “Sometimes I’ll get a little playful, like whenever there’s an animal on the packaging, I’ll try to make it cuter, and I’ll try to make it jump out a little bit more, only because that makes me happy.”

She found her niche here, in sculpting packaging (bottles, bags, tins, and cans) and snacks — things that have meaning, but that we often overlook. “I feel very at home making snacks,” Aranita says. “I’m sort of obsessed with childhood snacks. And not just my own childhood snacks — other people’s as well.”

Aranita grew up in Hong Kong, over 8,000 miles from my hometown of Houston,

Texas, yet there’s still so many food items in her series that were also part of my childhood — strawberry Pocky, Mochiko rice flour, Takis, even Squid brand fish sauce (though my family usually preferred the Three Crabs brand).

“Isn’t that wild?” she says when I mention that connection. “That’s why I’m so committed and interested in making these things. First of all, they’re cute and cuddly. But second of all, you’re from Houston. I grew up in Hong Kong. These are wildly different worlds, but you see something from my childhood, and you’re like, ‘Hey, that’s my childhood too.’”

There’s something so striking about her work. The nostalgia of childhood foods taking on a new life plays a factor, but the yarn sculptures are also, as Aranita puts it, unexpected. Crochet, embroidery, and fiber art in general is so often seen as a ‘grandma’ craft. When we think of sculpture, we picture it draws you in to think about what’s going on.” ceramic. We don’t expect to see disposable food packaging outside of a grocery store or kitchen, nor do we expect to see something made of yarn as art. And: “The fiber art is cuddly,” Aranita says. “It’s cute. I think people look down on cute, sometimes. But ‘cute’ can be a really powerful message.”

With Aranita’s art, there’s also this idea of preventing waste, of using what you have and creating something substantial from something that might otherwise be overlooked. The packaging that holds so many of our favorite snacks is meant to be thrown away. There’s no intention of longevity or even of reuse, but through fiber art, through sculpture, Aranita can give a bit more life and purpose to, and almost immortalize, what we deem trash.

She shows me a photo she took in Hong Kong of a tram painted with a cartoonish boar. It’s an official, government campaign to tell the public to not feed wild animals. But the illustrated animals aren’t scary, they’re adorable. “I’m just fascinated by this idea that ‘cute’ can convey messages,” she explains. “‘Cute’ can jump over barriers and really make people do things, in a non-threatening way.” And that’s just what she does with her art — each work is a cute representation of something you already know and love: “The cuteness draws you in, but then

“When I look at food, on the one hand, I’m like, all right. How can this connect us in terms of experiences? But also, how do we think about packaging as something more than trash? How do I take other people’s leftover yarn and turn it into something that makes people happy?” Aranita wonders. “This is all made from bits and pieces that people didn’t want, and it’s interesting, but also the limiting factor really pushes me and challenges me to make stuff — make something out of nothing.”

Plus, she adds, smiling: “You can hug it!”