Mallow Process

Milka Gordillo

Interview by L. Valena
April 15, 2024

Can you please start by describing the prompt that you responded to?

My first emotion to the image was that there were too many hands in the pot. I'm a pastry chef, so everything always goes back to the kitchen. I felt chaos, and some kind of frequency or electricity along the bottom. The blue, to me, represented some type of sadness, and silence at the same time. There was a lot of emotion in it, and I couldn't really pinpoint exactly what it was. The hands! Oh my god, I'm a pastry chef -- they represent so much!

Typically when I look at something on paper, I look from right to left, that's just how my brain works. So when I looked at it, the hand was open at first and then started closing. So it's not too many hands, it's arthritis! Which brought my thinking back to myself. My hand starts feeling a little crooked now and then, and my grandma has arthritis. It runs in the family. It made me wonder if the piece is about aging, and maybe the six hands represent six decades, and it takes four decades to find yourself.

How did you decide what you were going to make?

Let's start from the beginning. My journey with marshmallow started with the Dreamallow, which is a square mallow stuffed with salted caramel and chocolate. That represents the stuff inside of you, and that's how I started six years ago. The Dreamallow was just a process and an opening of this whole world of marshmallow. It's sitting on a cloud that's braided from three piped strands. In this piece, the Dreamallow represents the loss of a baby, which is why I placed it on top of the cloud. I also put a heart on it, and the yellow represents that sun that will always shine. And the butterfly because, obviously, it flew.

I took the electricity I was feeling from the prompt and transposed it into the texture behind the bear. It has a lot of texture, but it's still soft. Life can give you both, the sweet and sour moments. The bear represents perfection. The OCD. Everything has to be in place. I didn't put eyes on it, because I don't want to see, I just want to feel, and that's what the Dreamallow allows me to do. Under the butterfly on the bear is a little pig. That represents my grandma, who passed away two years ago, and it also represents the new wave of marshmallow, which is painting on it, and using it as art. This has allowed me to create what I'm creating, and to feel different emotions with the marshmallow. The butterflies are made of wafer paper. Everything in this piece gives you a sensory experience, which is what life is all about. It's all edible, yet it has become an art piece, so you wouldn't really want to eat it. Who wants to eat the perfection of this bear?

I think it's beautiful that you allowed the emotions that came up to take you on that ride. It sounds like it took you through some really dark stuff, but you got to the other side.

It was amazing. It was sad, there was grieving, and healing. It was beautiful. And it wasn't just a one-day process. It was almost like letting someone else's art showcase what my life has been.

I’ve found that, when interpreting someone else's art we have no context for, we tend to put our own narratives on it, which ends up reflecting more about our own experience than that of whatever the person who made it intended. I can't wait to know about the person behind the prompt.

The themes of loss and rebirth are very prevalent in this piece. Do you want to talk more about that?

The Dreamallow came exactly after I lost the baby. I just wanted to create something that would get me lost in the kitchen. The kitchen is a safe space for me. It's where I go for release, to stay quiet and go back inside. Dreamallow just grew from there. I've noticed that every time life gives me a little sour moment, or a learning moment, something creative comes. I found the marshmallow to be that outlet. I didn't want to create cakes. I'm an actual pastry chef, so I could have created whatever I wanted, but I wanted to create something that actually represents me. The softness of the Dreamallow is inside of me, but I've had to act strong because I moved to this country from Venezuela when I was nine or ten, without knowing English. That changes how you view life. I've had to create a persona, but the marshmallow represents that softness.

The ending of my abuela's life on this earth was beautiful. She was also a cook and she had a restaurant in Venezuela. I spent the last three years of her life here, not really taking care of her, but spending a lot of time with her, and getting to know the core of where she came from. Those are things we often don't find out about, because of family and being told not to ask certain questions. I broke all of those rules, because I knew I only had a short amount of time to find out the answers from her. So I asked questions about the business, about cooking. She wanted to connect with each one of us all the way to the end.

Towards the end, she struggled to eat sweets, but she would always eat a sweet. She would always find a way. You would find her in the kitchen, in a little corner where she would hide things. So I created a little marshmallow pig and gave it to my abuela, and she almost died. She looked at it and just said, "You're an artist." I will never forget those words. From that point on, I just went crazy. From that point on, the pig represents her.

It's so beautiful that it also seems to represent this moment that you had with her, when she was able to see you and reflect that back, which really propelled you forward. That's amazing.

She was amazing. At her passing, we were all there. I have to be at least a tiny bit close to who she was. She used food to connect with people, so I'm using marshmallow to do that. The first expression that people get when they see this giant 3D marshmallow is amazing. They touch it, and jump and scream, and I'm like, "There you are! I knew you were hiding somewhere!" I love it. I'm super blessed that her passing was the way that it was. I cry about it, because it's very emotional, but it's very healing. It's life.

Do you have any advice for another artist approaching this project for the first time?

I think we're all creative, and we're all creating all day. Find whatever that thing is that triggers an emotion. When in doubt, go hug a tree! Go play in the kitchen. Playing in the kitchen is really not that scary -- if you talk to the ingredients, they will talk back. If you're scared, they feel it!

[Laughs] Omg ingredients smell fear? They're like sharks! Or bees!

Exactly. If you get close to the ingredient and treat it with respect, it will give you something magic.

Anything else you want to say here?

Stay mallow.

Call Number: O125VA | O127FD.goMa

Milka Gordillo, born in Venezuela and raised in Miami, now resides in Palm Beach County, Florida. Eight years ago, Milka made a bold career shift to follow her culinary dreams. This passion led her to create DreaMallows, the first-ever handcrafted stuffed marshmallow. Today, she has taken her passion to new heights with the introduction of a 3D Giant Mallow Art Sensory Experience, transforming her culinary creations into interactive art pieces that engage and delight the senses.