The Bone Drawings (2007 – 2020)

The Bone Drawings reference the anatomical illustrations of the 22 bones of the human skull, as they appeared in the 25th edition of Henry Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body (1949). Doa Aly’s sustained interest in the human body and movement led her to the study of anatomy and joints, which eventually brought her to the early editions of Gray’s Anatomy.

These depictions—especially of the skull’s fragile, porous bones—embodied what she perceived as mimetic ambivalence. In attempting to reproduce reality faithfully, the draftsman, Henry Vandyke Carter, produced images that were not only accurate, but also profoundly seductive. Aly recognized in these illustrations the essential paradox of drawing: that to draw something is, in a sense, to make it disappear. As Jean-Luc Nancy writes in The Pleasure of Drawing, “drawing is the opening of form”—a movement away from the model toward the unknown.

From 2007 to 2017, Aly began combining these anatomical illustrations with figures in motion, portraits, and limbs, creating hybrid drawings rooted in literary sources and historical events. Over time, the drawings became increasingly abstract. The anatomical references were hollowed out and condensed into skeletal outlines, layered to form ossuary mosaics: accumulations of wandering lines searching for coherence. These forms composed webs of intensity and vanishing points—simultaneously forming, deforming, and transforming.