In Why I Write, the poet Eileen Myles refers to being compelled to create a ‘radiant hole’. When I first read this I was struck by this term - I felt that it articulated a feeling that I had been struggling to name within my own practice. When I reach a flow state in my painting, I feel that I enter a kind of radiant hole, which frees up my mind to move in unanticipated directions. The radiant hole is a metaphysical space of absence, potential, openness, and receptivity. It is a space of emptiness I inhabit that paradoxically makes the paintings glow more with potential and energy. These paintings are the residue of entering this state.

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Claudia Phillips is a Naarm/Melbourne based artist who works primarily with painting. She is interested in the ways that abstraction, and particularly colour, offer freedom from representation and language. Her intuitive, urgent, and sometimes vibrating style of abstraction articulates itself in large scale and gestural paintings on canvas.

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