Kiki Aranita is a fiber artist based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. With a scholarly background in Classical Literature and Comparative Literature and a previous career teaching Greek mythology and Ancient Greek language, she can’t help but see the world through the lenses of myth, often malleable at the hands of many ancient authors. As a classicist, her research focused on dismemberment in epic poetry and especially “sparagmos” – the act of being torn limb from limb – and the reception of classical epic in Renaissance Italian epic poetry. She primarily works with scrap yarn, sourced from neighborhood buy-nothing groups, grandmothers gone to heaven and knitters who quit. She crochets freehand, treating yarn and string as sculptural components. Now a chef and restaurateur by trade, she also incorporates found kitchen objects into some of her works: foam used to pack olive oil bottles, containers from food, the occasional plate.