Building Blocks

Staff photos by Mark Czajkowski

"I’ve just always been interested in what kind of an impact a space will have on you," says Princeton based sculptor Jamie Fuller.

   Someday, hundreds or maybe thousands of years in the future, explorers will stumble
on a mysterious, large-scale arrangement of bricks carefully placed in the
ground on a Vermont hillside.

   Like whoever first discovered the Anasazi stone paintings
in the Southwest, they’ll ponder the meaning of the structure and how it
was put together. They’ll probably conclude that the work was done to mark
a special event and that it was a community effort, in which many pairs
of hands labored and backs were strained.

   Little would they suspect the piece was done by one woman
— Princeton-based sculptor Jamie Fuller. During the summer of 1997,
Ms. Fuller worked seven days a week, putting in 12-hour days to create a
70-by-60-foot brick outline of a medieval-era Cistercian abbey.

   "It was something I had wanted to do for a long time,"
she says. "My brother is a builder and cabinet-maker in Vermont and he owns
the field. I suggested it to him and he said ‘Go for it.’"

   Photographs and documentation of this extraordinary outdoor
sculpture, "Field Piece — Bouchet 1200," as well as drawings, paintings,
prints, wall and floor constructions by Ms. Fuller, are on view at the Merck
Gallery of the Hunterdon Museum in Clinton, in the mini-retrospective Threshold/Transition.
The museum also is hosting an abstract photography exhibit that includes
a number of images by Princeton resident and photographer Susan Hockaday.
Both shows run through Jan. 19.

   In addition, Ms. Fuller’s sculpture is on view at the
Newark Museum in a group show, Sign at the Crossroads, through Feb.
9.

Some of Ms. Fuller’s work is of such large scale, it’s created in the field. Above, Ms. Fuller with a few of her smaller works.

   Several
elements make Ms. Fuller’s work unusual. Defining space and playing with
the perception of space are her primary concerns, and she does so by using
light and shadow, reflections, tracings, sequences and intersections. Her
acrylic on paper "Spatial Cues #10" and "Spatial Cues #8" may not look like
much to the casual observer, but look closer and you’ll see how she’s deconstructed
a rectangular shape — side by side and top from bottom. One
suspects she was the child who drew precise cubes and played with perspective
while the other little girls were drawing ponies and kittens.

is the way she references architectural floorplans from Cistercian abbeys.
These are sacred structures named after a contemplative monastic order,
founded in 11th-century France.
Again and again you see the outlines of these ancient monasteries in her
pieces. Ms. Fuller has been drawn to them since her undergraduate days,
when she was introduced to this architectural style by a beloved professor.

   "They’re based on geometry, proportion and light —
just what was essential," she says. "Everything was minimal, yet (the abbeys)
had this incredible quality because of their proportions. Also, when the
monks would chant, apparently the acoustics had a special aural resonance.

   "(Cistercian architecture) appealed to me on such a profound
level. I was moved by the spareness and the essentiality, but also something
even higher — the belief that mathematics speaks to something beyond
our human foibles."

   "Field
Piece" is a full-scale representation of a Cistercian abbey. It looks like
an orange-y brick road at ground level, but from the sky you can see the
modified cross shape, which contrasts with the surrounding green pasture.

   "The fact that it is full-scale is critical to the work,"
Ms. Fuller says. "This is an actual 13th-century French Cistercian abbey.
It’s based on the footprint (floorplan) and it’s the exact size it was when
it was originally built."

   A smallish woman with a warm smile, Ms. Fuller frequently
wears her hair in a braided ponytail, giving her an elfin appearance. She
must be deceptively strong, though, because the outdoor piece in Vermont
required digging up tons of dirt to create the outline of the sculpture,
lining it with tons of sand and finally placing the bricks in the trench.
Ms. Fuller did all this with just a shovel and a wheelbarrow.

An exhibit of Jamie Fuller’s is at the Hunterdon Museum in Clinton.

   "My
sister-in-law helped — a little," she says, smiling. "And my brother
helped when I was actually laying the (geometric) shape out with a transit
(a builder or surveyor’s tool). It was like creating the foundation of a
building. Because it’s on a hill, if I hadn’t triangulated the outline it
would have been distorted. I wanted it to be accurate from an infinite point
above."

   Once the exact proportions of the outline were calculated,
Ms. Fuller drew the shape on the ground, then dug a foot-deep trench, toting
the excess dirt away via wheelbarrow. She carted in the sand, flattening
it down to a perfectly level surface with a hand-made tamping device. All
the while, she calculated exactly how deep the trench would be so the bricks
would be flush with the surrounding grass.

   "It was so physical and so demanding, but it was really
wonderful, being out in that field in the summer, working harder than I’ve
ever worked in my life," she says.

   Ms. Fuller also enjoys creating sculpture out of construction
and other materials, such as brick, plate glass, copper sheets, wood, corrugated
cardboard and roofing paper. She likes their inherently minimalistic, unpretentious
qualities as well as the fact that they’re inexpensive — always a concern
for an artist.

   Ms. Fuller has a bachelor’s degree from Queens College
of the City University of New York in Flushing and a master’s from Yale
University. She’s received several grants from the Ford Foundation and was
awarded a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship in 1994-95.

   She’s been showing her work for more than 25 years, with
recent solo exhibits at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton and Mercer
County Community College. Ms. Fuller also has participated in group shows
throughout the state, in New York City, Philadelphia and Princeton, as well
as Italy and Australia. In 1990, she was part of Trenton Artists Workshop
Association’s exchange program with the Artist’s House in Moscow, Russia.

   Ms. Fuller lives with her husband, Gerald Boswell —
a lawyer and avid music lover — in an old home in Princeton’s Jugtown
neighborhood, filled with family pictures, woven textiles done by her maternal
grandfather, her own paintings and sculpture, friends’ photography and floor-to-ceiling
books and CDs.

   Her paternal grandfather and great-grandfather were both
architects, and Ms. Fuller jokes there must be some kind of family collective
unconscious — something handed down through the DNA — which has
given her a love for architecture. That’s why she’s spent so much time making
works that balance architecture and art.

   "I’ve just always been interested in what kind of an impact
a space will have on you," she says. "I’m fascinated by how space makes
you feel and whether it has an effect on how you pay attention."



Threshold/Transition, works by Jamie Fuller, is on view at the Merck
Gallery of the Hunterdon Museum of Art, 7 Lower Center St., Clinton, through
Jan. 19. Abstract Photography is on view in the Museum’s Main Gallery,
also through Jan. 19. Gallery hours: Tues.-Sun. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. For information,
call (908) 735-8415. On the Web: www.hunterdonartmuseum.org