Tracing the Hollow #1B

On 20 July 2025, walking home from Degas’ Obsession, moth caught my eye. That small encounter has since become a lens for thinking about the temporal displacement inscribed within Degas’s Dancers Practising in the Foyer, a work whose material stratigraphy, as conservation analysis indicates, comprises up to fourteen paint layers accrued over nearly three decades of revision, scraping, overpainting and addition.

As a child I was mesmerised by the chalk‑white incandescence of magnesium fireworks, a quality I sense, ever so faintly, within Degas’s pastel register: a trace that hovers on the surface.

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