Earth Team & Water Team

Two Roundtable Postal Collage Projects (2022-2023)

Round Table projects are leaderless collaborations in which each collaborator operates independently, in sequence, contributing according to their own judgment at every stage. The collaborator who works first on any given piece, completes that piece, after fellow collaborators have contributed. 

Since 2009, hundreds of people of all ages and backgrounds, mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area, but also across the country and around the world, have participated in Round Table projects and workshops. Well over one thousand collaborative collages have been featured in more than thirty exhibitions.

Visit the Round Table Collaboration website for complete information about past, current and upcoming projects and exhibitions. Projects include the annual Postal Collage Project and the ongoing ‘library style’ community collaborative collage project, Check It Out.

Round Table Collaboration is a project of Berkeley Commonplace a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, public-charity corporation with a mission to bring about and support collaborative art projects and creative activities for the purpose of personal, social and civic well being.

Earth Team

Earth Team

Process Notes

Round 1: C.K.Itamura, September 2022 - Last year I was gifted a stash of original, hand-drawn architectural plans because, I was told, “I’m an artist who does things with paper.” Good enough for me! Here I’ve taken one of the drawings and have applied a single-page-zine-fold to make it in to an eight page book. Do with it what you will and have fun with it!

Round 2: David McCarthy, October 2022 - Since I worked as an architect for the past forty some years, being send an architectural drawing for a collage was very inspirational, but also a bit of a challenge. I Googled Stephen Wilmoth and found this other life of his as a mathematician and artist. The attached page [found at http://morphohedron.com/] is from his Morphohedron website. It seemed only fitting to join his art with his “day job”. And hopefully inspiration for the continuation of this collage.

Round 3: Jane Jarrett, November 2022 - Hummm. Eight-page Z-folded architectural site plan. Hmmm. Morphohedrons. What??? Hummm.

Deciding to completely ignore the beautiful morphohedrons because I got completely lost in the geometry, I returned to our Earth Team theme and zeroed in on the landscape portions of the original drawing.

It’s complex, all chopped up into those separate pages. So I chopped up some lovely plant and landscape images and phrases and sprinkled them throughout the landscape portions of the site plan. And just for good measure, I added a little reduce-reuse-recycle textile (netting from a vegetable bag) onto the title block. Because, well, textiles! Eager to see what happens next, as always!

Round 4: Adrian Praetzellis, December 2022 - It just occured to me that this collage needed more sheep.

Round 5: Diana Jameson, Jan ‘23 - Added dream poem (thank you sheep), and approved plan!

Final Round: C.K.Itamura - Added color triangles & “W””I””L””M””O””T””H” on the sheep.

Water Team

Water Team

Process Notes

Round 1: C.K.Itamura, September 2022 - Last year I was gifted a stash of original, hand-drawn architectural plans because, I was told, “I’m an artist who does things with paper.” Good enough for me! Here I’ve taken one of the drawings and have applied a single-page-zine-fold to make it in to an eight page book. Do with it what you will and have fun with it!

Round 2: Vicky Kumpfer - Thank you C.K. for the inspiring project! An 8 page book… fun! Does a Book always tell a story? Does a book always have a beginning and an end?

Round 3: S.H. Walz, 11-03-22 - Thank you, C.K. and Vicky - you both inspired me to find the stories behind the drawing. One of my fears has been that as I age, I might turn to doing genealogy, and here I am, putting together the details of lives of strangers, to tell their semi-fictional, semi-factual story, where I get to choose the beginning and the ending. Oh my!

On to you Camille!

Round 4: Camille Pietrow, 12-3-2022 - Wow! I am impressed how all of you think out of the box! Architectural plans -> book -> creative stitching -> creative storytelling! I thought “inside the box”.

On to you Deana!

Round 5: Deana Wirth - I [went to Carmel with some friends and made them do a house hunt and] found the actual house in Carmel. The current house has a red door. So that was the inspiration of the watercolor. Also added a waterlily watercolor because the house has a fountain in front.

(See the photo of the house below. Deana took the photo.)

Final Round: C.K.Itamura - Added color circles with color pencils and drew dash-lines between them all.