Trusting the Process

Photography instructor Josh Meier P’24,’28 spent two weeks this summer as an artist-in-residence at an art house in Svolvær, Norway, on a remote island above the Arctic Circle with jaw-dropping views. He went in with almost no plan. “It’s been a really long time since I’ve had just time and space to create,” he says. His goal? Not to have one. Instead, his days bent on the unknown: “What do I want to make? What do I want to do? What’s speaking to me right now? What am I feeling?”

That open-endedness started with where he chose to go. Of the residency options Meier found, he picked the one that gave him the least to hold onto—the farthest north of them all, reachable only by a flight and then a three-hour ferry ride that, he notes, was not for the weak. “I knew I wanted to do something in a place that felt very different from anything I knew,” he says. “It was a little bit of an adventure just to get there … going from something very comfortable into this unknown.”

Meier has been turning over the idea of discomfort as a working practice for a while, well before this trip. “I like being dropped in somewhere and having to figure it out,” he says. Travel, for him, forces a version of that on purpose. “You go someplace where you’ve never been, and you have no choice but to get out of your comfort zone.” He sees a direct line from that unfamiliarity to what it produced in the studio. “This idea of sitting in discomfort and being okay with it, and working through that in a way that you grow from—that where the breakthroughs came from.”

The unfamiliarity extended to his materials, too. Meier packed light—supplies weren’t provided, and everything he brought had to fit in a bag for a flight, a ferry, and a walk. That scarcity was intentional. “This idea of working under constraints was really what I was trying to do,” he says. “I wanted to put myself in a situation where I couldn’t fall back on what I’ve always done, and I didn’t have an abundance of anything.”

He also set out to avoid the medium that comes easiest to him. Photography, after years of teaching it, “is so second nature that sometimes you don’t feel like it’s creative anymore,” he says. That's not to say he didn't take photos—no one cold resist the breathtaking landscape. But he spent most of his time in the residency’s basement print studio instead, working in printmaking and mixed media.

What came out of two weeks of working that way, Meier says, wasn’t a body of finished pieces so much as a different relationship to the work itself. “A lot of it was just getting back to that place of freedom of creating,” he says—freedom, specifically, from the identity that settles in around any craft practiced professionally for years. “I came to St. Andrew’s as a photography teacher, so it becomes sort of ingrained in your identity … but as an artist, you always want to be evolving and challenging yourself, because you have to grow and stretch yourself, right along with your students.”

In Norway, he says, he stopped measuring the work by what it produced. “I got back to a place of finding the process,” he says. “It was refreshing to not be thinking about end results.” That shift—process over product—is the thing he carried home, and what he can’t wait to share with his students this fall.

Meier will translate that shift in his classrooms on two levels. The first is technical: “I’m going to bring a lot of the stuff I did there to my printmaking classes here,” he says. “Specific processes and ways of working in print that I hadn’t used before and can now teach directly.” The second is philosophical. “What I want to convey to the students is that you’re not here to make a masterpiece, you’re here to be in that process,” he says. “It’s about you having thoughts and emotions and questions, and using these materials to answer those questions.”

It’s a lesson Meier says is easier to teach now that he’s relearned it himself. “So much of our world is all about avoiding discomfort: if it’s uncomfortable, we just leave it, or figure a way around it,” he says. “I want my students to be ok with that feeling, to sit it in, and to understand how powerful it can actually be."