Born in 1956, Mark Copeland has worked as a self employed creative since the mid 1970s. Throughout the 1980s and 90s he worked as a prop and model maker in television, film and advertising in tandem with having bi-annual exhibitions of his paintings at Portal Gallery, London.
In 2000 Mark received a Bafta award for his landscape models on BBC’s television series Gormenghast.
Combining his talents, from 2000 to 2004, following an exhibition of insect circus paintings at Portal Gallery, Mark, and his wife Sarah Munro, created the contents of what became The Grand Travelling Insect Circus Museum. Housed in a vintage Bedford lorry, the ‘collection’ toured extensively throughout Great Britain and the Continent for the next fifteen years and was visited by in excess of 200,000 people. Covid restrictions and the ramifications of Brexit (which curtailed travel to mainland Europe) led to the museum being taken off the road in 2021.
The Insect Circus Museum is now permanently housed in a room at 2 Orchard Close and will be open to view during the four weekends of June as well as at other times by appointment.
Before and during the covid lockdown, Mark worked on an exhibition of paintings and documents created following research into his rather unusual family history. Entitled “21 Remarkable People”. The incomplete work was first shown, as part of Out There Festival, at Skippings Gallery, Great Yarmouth in 2019 and, on completion, at the Maritime Museum, Hull, as part of Freedom Festival 2021. Many of the paintings and some of the ephemera will be on show during Open Studios.
In November 2024, Mark had an exhibition at the Bell Gallery, Bungay, Suffolk. Entitled ‘Livermere Parva Village Revel’ it featured paintings inspired by local folk tales and folk heroes. Many of the paintings from the exhibition, and new work on the same subject, will be on sale at Open Studios.
