Gaskell pioneers a new discourse of contemporary photography where within each of her series, the narrative of her photographs is disrupted, "its fragments functioning like film stills excised from their context but suggesting a missing whole.

"[6] In a 2002 interview with curator Matthew Drutt of the Menil Collection, Gaskell describes her creative process and the inspiration she draws from other sources in the following way: "The stories and events that I choose to use as jumping-off points are simply that.

"[3] 1996 In haunting photographic scenes of preadolescent girls, Gaskell alludes to well-known children's literature, such as Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which can be found in two of her series: wonder (1996–97) and override (1997).

A description about the series written by Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum curators states, "[The seven versions of Alice] try to control the changes to her body by literally, physically holding her in place — a potent metaphor for the anxiety and confusion experienced by children on the verge of adolescence.

[7] Gaskell's film Floater repeats in a backwards sequence a scene of an Ophelia-like young woman in a pool of water, trying to decide whether she should drown or save herself.

[9] The name of the series is drawn from the children's game hide-and-seek, the dual personality of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the literal skin, or hide, that creates a boundary between the inside and the outside, the self and the other.

by proxy takes on a darker tone by combining the fictional, gullible, and lovable Sally Salt character with a real-life serial killer, Genene Jones, a pediatric nurse who, in the early 1980s, was found guilty of the murder of several children in Texas.

The accompanying 21-minute film, similar to her piece, Floater (1997), features a woman floating under water in a state of non-being, neither fully dead or alive.

"[2] 1997 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2009 2010 2013 2014 1998 2002 2007 2012 Grace Glueck, writing in The New York Times in 2004, described Gaskell as an established "maker of spooky, tension-filled feminine fictions", her work recalling Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca and the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

[40] Robert Mahoney, reviewing Gaskell's first exhibition of color photographs in 1997, calls the show a "masquerade" with a pair of "pretty twins" playing at Alice in Wonderland in blue pinafores, white tights and "black Mary Jane shoes".

In his view, the blue and white coloration recalls the Virgin Mary, while the use of young women to represent "prepubescent girls" brings sexuality into the images.

[41] Christopher Mooney, writing for ArtReview in 2014, reviews an exhibition in Paris of Gaskell's photographs alongside her ex-partner Douglas Gordon's "wall, floor, and corner works".