Sara Leslie: Happy to combine influences from Japan and Bantry
Cork artist Sara Leslie is one of the recipients of a Dearcan Bursary.
At Sara Leslie’s preschool in Japan, there was a 100-year-old turtle that lived in the garden. She can’t remember his name, but she does remember him, vividly.
She remembers forest walks where the children gathered bamboo shoots to prepare and eat, and she remembers the cooking and cleaning rotas that children in Japanese schools participate in as a matter of course.
“If you were on the cooking rota, you wore a white coat and a hairnet and you’d dish out the food to everybody and you’d all eat it together,” Leslie, 27 and now based in Cork city, says. “Or on cleaning rota, you’d all have to clean the floors. When we moved to Ireland, I remember getting in trouble for something in school, and my punishment was that I had to sweep outside. I remember going, ‘that’s all I have to do?’”
Leslie, born to an Irish father and a Japanese mother, moved to Ireland, or more precisely to Bantry in West Cork, at eight.
Now 27, she’s something of a creative polymath: an artist and graphic designer who has turned her hand to furniture-making, as well as a musician who plays trad mandolin, piano, guitar and bass.
For Leslie, her Japanese and Irish influences are in balance, intermeshed. “I don’t feel like a different person when I’m there or when I’m here,” she says. “There are certain cultural clashes when it comes to things like work ethic. I think I can tend to have a perfectionist streak and the lads I’m working with will be like, ‘you’re grand, you’re not getting paid any extra for it.’ But I’ll feel better if it’s done right.
“Irish people are very good at getting to know one another and socialising, but in Japan you can see people get too fixated on a project and totally isolate themselves and you wonder if they’re getting much joy from doing it.”
Examples of her work in collage, wood cuts, pyrography, graphic design and joinery can be seen on her Instagram page, Mori Art - Mori is Japanese for forest – and she’s this year’s awardee of Benchspace Cork’s Dearcán Bursary – Dearcán is Irish for acorn.
Fittingly, trees – their age, slow growth, and increasingly, their material properties, explored through her work – are a constant source of inspiration to Leslie. She’s been spending time at a specialist sawmill, and has recently taken part in a tree-planting project in Iniscarra, where 30,000 saplings were planted.
“You get to know why the grain might be oriented in a certain way, because the tree was growing under certain conditions. You get a sense of the whole process of making a piece of furniture, which actually starts with the tree growing, sometimes for hundreds of years.
“Imagine getting to make something out of those trees that you planted,” she says, her eyes lighting up. “That would just be...full circle. But like, I’d be fairly old at that stage.”
Her burgeoning career in design and furniture-making has been as organic in growth as any of the trees she loves: she’s a big believer in not forcing things, in letting things grow and evolve.
“If I’m honest, I haven’t really had a goal or anything,” she says. “I just get asked if I want to make an art piece or a piece of furniture, and I just do it, or I get asked to get involved in something, and I do, and that leads to something else. There’s been a lot of toes being dipped in different things, but now it all seems to be coming together and nurturing each other.”
Benchspace’s Dearcán Bursary, she says, is a welcome motivator: “It’s lighting a fire under my arse.”
Benchspace, located in Cork’s former Ford factory, is a co-making space for designers and makers, where access to professional machinery and the space needed to set up a craft business incubates emerging creative businesses. Allowing access to pooled resources for a small fixed fee, it’s a model utilised in the Netherlands, the UK and Australia.
The Dearcán Bursary, supported by Cork County Council Arts Service and South Cork Local Enterprise Office, gives Leslie a year’s access to her own bench at Benchspace, but, more importantly, she feels, she will rub shoulders with a variety of skilled craftspeople who work there.
“I want to learn as much as possible,” she says. “ I’m really excited about being around people practising their own craft in front of you, and making connections. I really like the ethos. I only started a couple of weeks ago, and loads of opportunities have come up already. It’s both exciting and daunting.”
