Sarasota PINC Conference is ‘like a bubble bath for your mind’

Sixteen eclectic speakers at the fourth annual PINC Experience wow a capacity crowd Thursday.

Tim Dodd is a spaceflight advocate who communicates to audiences while wearing a used Russian spacesuit.

Lucy Sparrow has letters tattooed on her knuckles that spell out “Felt Life,” a reference to her passion for creating art from the fuzzy fabric.

Claire Elsdon quit her job as a stockbroker, moved to Tanzania and set up Africa’s first women’s motorcycle maintenance workshop, giving midwives the skills to drive to remote areas to assist in childbirth.

Dallas Seavey is the youngest winner of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and wrote a book about how his dogs taught him to see pleasure in challenges from blizzards to navigating thin ice on rivers.

The four were among 16 eclectic and inspiring speakers from around the world who were on hand Thursday for the fourth annual PINC Experience held at the Sarasota Opera House. PINC stands for people, ideas, nature and creativity.

“When you walk out of here today you will never see the world the same way again,” said Anand Pallegar, the founder of DreamLarge, the host of the event.

Megan Greenberg, director of communications for DreamLarge, said 430 tickets were sold for the daylong event.

“It runs the gamut from the quirky and interesting to the inspirational and important,” Greenberg said. “It makes you think ‘What am I doing with my place in the world?’

“It’s like a bubble bath for your mind. It’s a day you give yourself permission to recharge your batteries, a remembrance of why the world is still such an awesome place.”

Some of Thursday’s speakers represented serious, though not widely publicized, topics. Jaha Dukureh, for example, was a victim of female genital mutilation in her native country, The Gambia.

According to her biography, 3 million girls and women around the world are at risk, including 500,000 in the United States.

She started a support system out of her living room, and her efforts have led to a petition signed by 200,000 people in the United States and was recognized by President Barack Obama. In 2016 she was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World.

Among the quirky speakers, if not the quirkiest, was Sparrow, whose love of art as a young child took her down paths she never could have imagined.

She works mainly with felt and wool to create everyday objects that on the surface seem fun, but there is an underlying reflection of consumerism and social exclusion in her work as well, and the art world has taken notice of her.

After sewing routine consumer objects made of felt for six months straight, she opened up a store in London called the Cornershop — and that’s exactly what it was. It was a small grocery store, only everything inside was made of felt. People couldn’t get enough of it and Sparrow soon branched out.

She made a gun shop, with felt rifles, grenades, knives and sticks of dynamite. A private collector bought the entire thing. “Something I thought my 7-year-old self could never comprehend,” she said.

She made an adult shop, complete with a peep show made from felt puppets. She made a felt crown jewel for the Queen’s 90th Anniversary that was featured on the BBC. For an art show in Miami she set up a deli, complete with felt sandwich fillings, and some looked so real that people tried to eat them, she said.

Her appeal grew so large, the passion expanded so deep, that she had “Felt Life” tattooed on her knuckles because “if anything will stop you from getting employed at a normal job it is knuckle tattoos. It was an incentive for me to keep working hard.”

This year she opened another corner shop in New York called 8 till Late.

It was a replica of a small grocery store replica everything inside was made of felt. She made 9,000 items equating to nine tons of stuff and it took four cargo planes to fly it all from London to New York. The store was featured in the New York Times, and everything inside sold out in 16 days.

“I couldn’t believe the emotional response to it,″ she said. “We had people crying, which was awkward. But it was fantastic, the best experience of my life.”