The Hole in the Ocean with Sonia Farmer

What to expect

Sonia Farmer’s work in NELEVEN confronts an environmental atrocity from just over a century ago: the 1923 expeditions of filmmaker Ernest Williamson and Roy W. Miner, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who removed 40 tons of coral from the Andros Great Barrier Reef to build a museum diorama.

Drawing from archival materials—including Williamson’s memoir, articles, correspondence, and ephemera—Sonia explores the motivations behind this historic extraction and its lasting impact. Her talk reframes the event within today’s coral extinction crisis, encouraging reflection on the ecological and cultural voids left by such extractions and how creative practices can help to repair the damage. This conversation invites us to consider environmental erasure and the power of art to heal.

About the artist

Sonia Farmer is a writer, visual artist, small press publisher, and educator who uses the form of the book and its allied crafts to expand Caribbean narratives from within its geographical space. She is the founder of Poinciana Paper Press, a center for book arts, writing, and publishing in Nassau, The Bahamas, dedicated to empowering the diversity of narratives in Caribbean art and literature. She is the author of Infidelities (Poinciana Paper Press, 2017), longlisted for the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the artist book A True & Exact History (Poinciana Paper Press, 2018), which won the 2019 Holle Award for Excellence in Book Arts. Her poetry has won the 2011 Prize in the Small Axe Literary Competition, been shortlisted for the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, and has appeared in various journals and self-published limited-edition chapbooks. Sonia holds a BFA in Writing from Pratt Institute and an MFA in Book Arts from the University of Iowa.