Artist, Frances Stark: I'm Frances Stark, and the work that we're looking at is called Quilt with Birds and Boxes, from 2004. It's basically modeled after a crazy quilt, where you would take the scraps of the most kind of delicate fabrics and piece them together in a non-orderly fashion.
Each little piece, are cast-offs from the process that I used to make earlier work. I just wanted to kind of go back and look at some of the things that I had done before; not so much at what the final result was, but at all these little fragments. ...
Narrator: In Stark’s earlier work, which she called “quotation pieces,” she took a line of text from a favorite novel or poem and created a typed portrait of it in an attempt to give body and form to the writing.
Frances Stark: In the earlier work, I would basically trace over the letters of a printout, and using carbon paper, and leave the carbon impression on the drawing paper. If you look closely, you'll see that it's repeated text and sometimes a ballpoint pen has gone over a laser printout.
So much of my work from the very beginning, came out of this sort of intimate relationship between a reader and an author, where, it's like, "Oh my god!" and you underline a sentence because it's so amazing. And so I would actually make work //out of that idea of falling in love with the author or the sentence.