Play While You Can

Dale Copeland
‘Play while you can’
Ceramic face, egg timer, toy rocking horse partially behind a steel curtain and that thing in the front? ... it looks like some sort of cut-off valve.
190 x 240 x 90 mm

“Paul looked at it and said it's ‘Play while you can.’ That's a better title, and a better state of mind, than what I'd been thinking it meant. I was considering something more like ‘Put away the toys’. When you realise that life is short, playtime is over.”

Dale Copeland describes herself as a mathematician-turned-artist. The one time head of a college maths and physics department and freelance computer programmer, Copeland, at the age of forty-three opted for a new lifestyle devoted to art and motherhood. She is now a 6th Dan black belt in Taekwon-Do and is still training regularly. Dale has often been referred to as the back bone of the Taranaki arts community, she is currently the driving force behind the artist collective called Virtual TART which shows their work online through the Virtual TART site www.tart.co.nz. In 2012 Dale was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to the arts. Dale lives at Puniho with painter Paul Hutchinson.