Space and Light: Ayla El-Moussa's Bodies Of Color

By @JustinWetch

Ayla El-Moussa grew up on a hobby biodynamic farm. Organic farming taken to the next level, based on Rudolf Steiner's philosophy about creating harmony with nature. The same Steiner who founded Waldorf schools, where Ayla learned to see the world differently.

"I went to a Waldorf school. There's a lot more creativity and focus on opening all of your senses." While other kids memorized multiplication tables, Ayla was doing woodwork, painting, knitting. Her parents were both Waldorf teachers who "pushed us to wander in our mind." Creative by blood, creative by design.

Every evening at sunset, her mom made her chase their free-range chickens around the yard to put them to sleep. "I had 12. I had to catch 12," she laughs. If you've seen Rocky, you know this isn't easy.

Then her dad gave her a camera. "That basically changed everything."

She applied to exactly one university. An art school in London. Eventually she transferred to Parsons in New York to learn the technical side. No plan B. Just art.

"I have always been gently allergic to being called a nude photographer."

Her work features the human form, often unclothed, and people see exactly what's in front of them. A body. Skin. The obvious thing. But Ayla isn't interested in the obvious thing.

"The nude element is not even the interesting part. I really want people to look beyond the body. It's a lot more than a photograph. And a lot more than a nude body."

She discovered this through spatial exploration, not just depth of field tricks but actual dimensional space within the frame. She wants you to get lost in the geometry of form itself, the way light carves shadow, the way a curve becomes architecture.

People don't always get it. "I've heard some people say, 'I like your work, but my wife won't let me collect nude work or something.'" She laughs, annoyed. "This is not at all what it's about."

The misunderstanding pushed her to evolve, to make work where the body becomes unrecognizable as body.

Her parents kept strict rules. "I wasn't allowed to be on the computer for more than an hour or two a week, one movie a week. I had to read the books before I watched the movie." Discipline and wonder in equal measure.

Ayla's first love was horses. Dressage specifically. She got a Fjord horse first, then a Quarter Horse. She still volunteers at animal rescues. "When I work with horses or animals, time will just disappear."

Her other passions surprise people. Vintage Italian cars. The UFC ("I love the UFC. I'm a big fan"). She sees it as modern gladiatorial combat, the psychology of championship.

As a child, she'd gallop her pony through trees pretending to be Arwen saving Frodo from Ringwraiths. "One of my favorite memories."

Online, people think she's intimidating. "I'm not as scary as I look online, I promise."

She's just a girl who chased chickens and loved horses and watches cage fights and dreams about vintage cars.

Ayla made a gentleman's handshake with Pravijn at Shape. She promised him a collection on a platform that embodied the cypherpunk ethos she believed in.

Then the work refused to come.

She was going to call it "Auras." A play on Pravijn's nickname as the "aura farmer" of Shape. Every time she sat down to create, nothing clicked. The style kept changing. Dark backgrounds, then light. Whole figures, then fragments.

So she avoided it. Created an entire seven-piece collection called Guardians instead. Then Alpha Waves. Anything to not face the thing she'd promised.

"I was fucking refusing," she admits.

She went back through her archives looking for breadcrumbs. Her piece "Parts of Her" had sold at Christie's, but she'd always known it wasn't finished. The idea of fragmenting the body, making parts speak louder than wholes.

Still nothing.

Then one day she sat bolt upright. "It's called Bodies of Color." The whole thing crystallized instantly. The name, the vision, the campaign. Flow state.

"I can't create from a place of stress or pain or sadness. I really have to come from it with a clear mind. Otherwise it just doesn't work."

Ayla reads Gustave Le Bon's "The Crowd," about mob psychology and how individuals act differently when absorbed into groups. She sees it everywhere. Salem witch trials. Twitter pile-ons. Crypto tribalism.

"People saying 'we're different, crypto is changing the world.' I'm like, sure. But we're losing our principles of what it means to be decentralized."

Malcolm Gladwell wrote about a community limit of around 100 people. Beyond that, it's hard to truly care about everybody. The crowd reduces complex things to their most obvious elements. Like reducing her work to "nude photography."

Her favorite movie is Phantom Thread. She's watched it dozens of times. "I love that movie." The perfectionism, the score, the way it puts her in a specific mood. She catches details other people miss, laughs at herself for overanalyzing everything.

After seeing a James Turrell exhibit in Paris, Ayla couldn't stop thinking about how we sit with color, how we perceive hue and form and light.

She studied Brancusi and Henry Moore, sculptors who broke the female figure into abstract forms. Georgia O'Keeffe's color and movement, sexuality without being explicit. Warhol's split canvases. Josef Albers' color theory.

Bodies of Color uses ChatGPT to generate 100 Pantone color schemes. She photographs herself in her studio (Sade playing, or sometimes a movie she's rewatching). The photography is fast, just her base canvas.

Then comes Photoshop and Procreate. Hours painting color onto form, overlaying canvas texture to create something between traditional painting and digital glitch. Each piece is one photograph split into four quadrants. One body, four frames, geometric constraints. The Warhol influence made explicit.

Some pieces are easy to look at. Others are jarring. Complementary colors clash. You're not quite sure what you're seeing. A butt? An arm? A back? Does it matter?

"I know a work is finished when I can no longer see myself." That's her north star now. The ego death. Making the work not about Ayla but about form, space, and color as universal language.

She wants you to stop. To sit with it. "You don't even have to like it. I just want to get someone to stop and think and not fully understand what they're seeing right away."

This is her bookend on the body of work about bodies. She's moving toward physical sculpture next. Marble. Three-dimensional space. The logical evolution of someone who's always been interested in depth, looking beyond the obvious, the wonder of form itself.

Get lost in the lines. That's all she's asking.

Bodies of Color launches on Shape on November 4.

@aylaelmoussa shouts out @6529er for the career-defining moment of collecting two moving works early on, @batsoupyum for the 1:11 synchronicity that reminded her magic exists everywhere, and @pravijn at Shape for unwavering patience and support through the creative storm.

For future Weekly Dose episodes, she recommends@enixsta (someone whose mind and evolving practice she deeply admires), @JimenaBuenaVida (been here since the Clubhouse days with a fascinating story), and @joelle_lb (a photographer who learned to trade, bought her apartment through it, and now uses AI to create autonomous systems).

When asked what she wishes people understood about her, Ayla circles back to the beginning: "I'm not as scary as I look online, I promise."

Ayla El-Moussa was recommended by @SamanthaCavet.