Carly McAskill is a visual artist and researcher whose interdisciplinary practice spans drawing, painting, collage, and creative writing. Her work explores storytelling as a methodology of care, remembrance, and embodied relationality. Rooted in personal experience and intergenerational memory, McAskill’s practice engages the complexities of identity, temporality, and human connection. Through mark-making, layering, and poetic text, she navigates the fragmented, non-linear dimensions of lived experience, positioning the aesthetic as a site of emotional, ethical, and relational inquiry.

Painting holds a central place in McAskill’s artistic practice. It is a tactile and conceptual process—an embodied way of thinking through materials. She approaches painting as a space for emotional resonance and transformation, where colour, texture, and gesture act as languages of their own. Through its layering and ability to hold both clarity and ambiguity, painting allows her to explore memory, beauty, care, and loss. In this space, she attends to presence as material and temporal, creating work that speaks to what is felt more than what is said.

Drawing complements her painting practice as a method of intimate reflection and observation. These visual strategies often exist in dialogue with her creative writing—particularly poetry and narrative—that expand the affective and associative potential of the work. Collage functions in her practice as a dynamic tool of reconstruction and disruption, reflecting the fragmentary nature of memory and the multiplicity of experience. Floral motifs frequently appear in her work, serving as metaphors for inheritance, regeneration, grief, and continuity.

McAskill’s practice is deeply informed by feminist pedagogy, disability and age studies, and arts-based research methodologies. She is currently completing a research-creation PhD in Communication Studies at Concordia University. Her doctoral project, Respite: Sketching Time and Stories of Care with Dementia, emerges from over seven years of professional respite work, supporting individuals living with dementia and their caregivers. This research does not include painting, but instead centers on sketching, poetry, and storytelling as modes of connection, communication, and remembrance across cognitive, temporal, and generational differences. It foregrounds artistic practices that offer presence and relation in moments where traditional language may falter.

Recent projects include Embodied Books: Binding Together Illness, Art and Learning (2022–present), a health humanities research initiative exploring illness and pedagogy through artistic practice, and Soil and Water (2024), a collaborative living-lab project addressing aging, ecology, and domestic gardening, for which she created a series of illustrations. These projects reflect McAskill’s ongoing commitment to interdisciplinary, care-based practices that move across visual, narrative, and community-based forms.

At the heart of McAskill’s practice is a commitment to attentive presence—a sustained engagement with what is held, remembered, and released. Through painting, drawing, and writing, she cultivates spaces for reflection and dialogue that honour the emotional, narrative, and relational dimensions of lived experience. Her work makes visible the quiet, intimate textures of care and connection that shape our shared humanity.