Seeing through the artistic lens, art, its process, and the human being form an energetic triad. Every interaction in this field can turn into empirical perception for the artist, revealing a complex inner state. By allowing this complexity to unfold, the artist’s psychic center can travel between the triadic landscape and become at once creator, artwork, and observer. This dynamic, where man becomes a temporary phenomenon of the triadic exchange, echoes the understanding that the creative process, with all its aspects and phases, is never passive. The inner unfolding, while psychological in nature, inevitably opens toward a broader phenomenological dimension. Mirroring it with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s articulation of perception as an embodied mode of participation in the world, the creative process turns the man’s (the artist’s) participation into a lived experience of the world’s embodiment.1

When we treat art-making as a purely technical process, our understanding becomes only an effort spent within an analytical framework. The mind fails to bridge toward spiritual awakening, meaning that our awareness remains veiled. Art, and the making of an artwork, involve listening, feeling, thinking, and sensing. Each inner state operates not as a detached viewport of the process but as an embodied life-form in the present. Eventually, this prolonged psychic state resolves into a path to unveil awareness, with the artist (man) becoming object, subject, and mediator at once. Such a transition—from inner turbulence to embodied clarity—makes visible the continuity between psychic life and perceptual presence. This is an inner state in which a “space” becomes possible for the artist to fill presently throughout the entire process of making.

In the act of being present, releasing the self from a predetermined mind is essential. Transcendence of emotional weight and memory content could be seen as a way of resolving complexity. In this sense, resolved complexity means a state in which the artist can intentionally observe what he does as much as he does it—notice how a decision to mark the material, then move it, changes not only the work but also the way of understanding everything moving within and without.2 In this movement, we see how the artist’s internal process resonates with philosophical accounts of embodied perception. Throughout the entire experience, we can, though not solely, relate the artist’s perception to what Alva Noë calls an “enactive” way of seeing—a practice of doing.3

The relational field

Turning the seeing toward a personal understanding, I begin from the conviction that a work of art does not exist in isolation. It projects and receives energy; it is activated by context, by the bodies that encounter it, and by the histories that surround it. Continuing my conviction, I will agree with Nicolas Bourriaud’s notion of art as a set of relations rather than autonomous objects.4 When I place an object in a room, I am not only arranging form and material: I am building and composing relations. In this sense, the artwork is not a fixed entity but a node of potential, whose full meaning arises only through its encounters. The work’s meaning emerges in the field between things—between my intention and my viewing, between material resistance and my persistence, and between a remembered gesture and a new improvisation: the triad involved.

Yet relationally, it is not neutral. Claire Bishop reminds us that relations are also responsibilities, shaped by power, invitation, and exclusion.5 Such relations place the artist within an expanded field of accountability, one that reframes not only outcome but also responsibility. I am not the sole origin of meaning; I am a node in a network of matter and interconnectedness, carried by influences as much as I emit them. This brings forth responsibility in the present, in the now that always precedes the future. If the work opens a space for encounter and discovery, I remain accountable for the conditions I create: scale, rhythm, tactility, and the invitations or refusals embedded in the situation. The relational field is therefore both ethical and aesthetic: it also asks how my choices shape other people’s experiences and how those experiences reshape me.

Even when the creative act involves mostly individual presence, the other’s energy carried within me can introduce into the making process a transcending relational layer. Their gestures, memories, and intensities become silently interwoven, showing that solitude in creation is never entirely solitary. The field continues to move through me as I move through it: the energy of the triad.

Placing, displacing, transforming

Flowing naturally from these relational states, my practical methodology emerges through three verbs: place, displace, and transform. Simple and precise, as I perceive them, each verb speaks to a mode of inquiry within the triadic and relational field.

To place in the space is to test a hypothesis, as well as a method to listen, see, and sense the object. Donald Schön describes this as “reflection-in-action”—the capacity to think through doing.6 I must add that self-reflection comes into play too. An example to better illustrate my point can be this: you set a form, a color, and a weight into the field and observe the consequences, unconsciously recording your movement, and decide how to continue. Therefore, placement can be provisional and permanent; it is a question posed to the room, to yourself, and to the unknown to come. When the answer is revealed, placement turns into a permanent form—within the context of an artwork creation.

There are various moments when you sense that the question you pose does not come out through a fulfilled answer. Displacement would then be the following stage of the process. To displace is trying to answer that question by moving what you have already placed—to alter balance, to create tension, to observe from different angles, and why not to reveal hidden relationships, or better said, hidden layers of connection. Displacement is information as much as method: a way to involve perception in a continuous experience. It tells you what the work resists and what it invites.

Within this continuous experiential perception, transformation is the slow accumulation of small experiments. Material resists and suggests; form emerges where negotiation meets constraint. This interaction between human and nonhuman agency aligns with contemporary materialist thought—particularly Jane Bennett’s and Karen Barad’s arguments that matter acts, pressures, and participates.7 The finished object, if it exists at all, is not the end of a linear process but a snapshot of an ongoing conversation between intention and materiality.

Going back to my practice, these movements are also movements of self. Each placement asks, "Who am I in relation to this material?" Each displacement asks, "Who do I become when I change my mind?" The studio becomes a laboratory for identity, where decisions register as shifts in posture, attention, and ethical stance. Transformation, then, is not only material but also personal—an unfolding of being within the field of art-making.

The artist as witness and agent

As transformation happens, the artist acts as both creator and observer. Making requires commitment and willingness to act without full knowledge of the outcome. Witnessing requires patience, the capacity to hold what emerges without immediately subsuming it to intention. Gaston Bachelard suggested that creation and imagination require dwelling inside the intimate spaces of matter—a notion that complements the sense of presence in the studio.8 Nevertheless, I will add that creating requires involvement in the dialogue between matter and nonmatter as well. When you can hold both roles simultaneously, the work attains a depth that neither role could produce alone.

This duality has a meditative quality. The quality here is not tangible but energetic, one that returns us to the first field of the triad formed at the beginning of the relationship between art, process, and man. In the framework of psychoanalysis, this quality corresponds to the tension released between opposites. Within you, the tension brings forth moments when attention narrows to a single gesture and, paradoxically, you feel expanded—present to the material, to the room, to a lineage of decisions that precede and will follow. In those moments, you are object and subject: the work observes as much as it is observed by you. That reciprocity is not mystical in a supernatural sense but embodied in the mystical aspect of the practice. It is the felt awareness that your hands, your choices, and your history are entangled with the work’s becoming.

Being both witness and agent also shapes how you speak about the work. You resist definitive statements and instead offer processes, thresholds, and questions—what you did and what the work did back to you. This language of reciprocity invites not only your awareness but also the awareness of others into the field, rather than closing it down.

Practice as inquiry

In this passage, I will relate my view to a personal understanding of the art practice. For me, process is not a means to an end, but a way of knowing—a method of perceiving, noticing, and discovering. This view resonates with practice-led theorists, such as Graeme Sullivan, who argues that art is not the illustration of pre-formed ideas but a research method in its own right: knowledge emerges within and through action.9 The studio, therefore, becomes a site where aesthetic and epistemic experiments unfold simultaneously.

I keep records—sketches, photographs, short notes—not to secure meaning, but to trace the evolution of questions. These traces show how decisions accumulate into form and how form, in its turn, reshapes the questions I ask. They are “participants” in a dialogue, rather than documentation of conclusions.

Neither confusion nor failure is a disruption, but a source of information embedded within the experience of making. A displaced element that destabilizes a composition teaches me as much as a carefully executed plan. Failure exposes assumptions, reveals habitual tendencies, and produces temporary hypotheses that can grow in new directions. This echoes Richard Sennett’s reflections on craft: the slow learning that arises from friction, correction, and renewal.10

Embracing that uncertainty is essential to a practice oriented not only toward producing objects but also toward understanding the conditions of the present and the ongoing emergence of becoming.

Conclusion

I am discussing an art practice of attention, rather than a practice purely of physical aesthetics and form. By placing, displacing, and transforming, we can learn how to ask deeper questions of materials, of space, and of self. The same process can evolve in the viewer's psyche, even though placement, displacement, and transformation are purely subjective. In both senses, creator and viewer, the triad of art, process, and human being is not a static field of relations but an energetic structure: it projects energy into the relational field and returns that energy transformed. For an artist, the practice is clear; while for an audience, the invitation is simple—to enter that field to witness the work’s negotiations and to recognize that process is a way of knowing as much as it is a way of making.

References

1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945).
2 It is a condition in which the artist’s perceptive field and his actions align, enabling a fluid movement between doing and observing.
3 Alva Noë, Action in Perception (2004): Noë’s notion of enactive perception emphasizes that seeing is inseparable from doing—an insight that parallels the artist’s embodied engagement with material. In this view, perception arises through active involvement, which mirrors the artist’s way of thinking through movement, gesture, and material encounter.
4 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (1998).
5 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012).
6 Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner (1983).
7Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010). Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007).
8 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958).
9 Graeme Sullivan, Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in Visual Arts (2010).
10 Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (2008).