Process and experience: Theory and practice considered from an art-researcher/educator’s perspective

Abstract The article discusses three projects of artwork. The first two projects are the author’s own and that of a 2015–16 fourth-year BFA advisee student concerning the question of relationship between visual/material process and one’s sentient experience. From a researcher/educator’s point of view, the process philosophy of A. N. Whitehead is considered in relation to the student’s work and aspects of the metapsychological theory of Lacan form the basis of consideration of the author’s work. Whitehead’s theory has a generative role in the article. Such theory provides articulation of the process of feeling and is cited in relation to an art-educational methodology for conducting projects. The artwork of a 2017 advisee student is then discussed in illustration of a point concerning time in the Lacanian context, as well as providing another example of the methodology in practice. The author explains his own artwork in support of an idea that links it with each of the students’ concerns, where the process preferences the developmental ambiguity of practice-based research. The article may be of relevance to art and design educators and their students working at the intersection of theory and practice.