Daisie Coates is a visual artist from Cornwall graduating in 2026 from the Photography BA at UWE. She also completed a study abroad programme at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest, where she developed her practice within an international context. Her work is inspired by personal experiences that explore themes of gender, anthropology, and belonging. With an experiential process that is underpinned by extensive research, her photographs shift between constructed imagery and intuitive practice. By exploring how images offer meaning, her work aims to question ideas around authorship and representation. Whilst Daisie is interested in all photographic forms, her graduate photography project 'Uncut' uses constructed imagery to challenge both power and control structures. This work has been exhibited at multiple small venues across the UK.

‘Uncut’ is a provocation on systems of cultural dominance. Through interrogating power, privilege, and sovereignty - the series examines how patriarchal, imperial, and neo-liberal systems mediate representation. Drawing on existing archives for contextual reference, the work aims to question the validity and very notion of cultural archives, examining the authorship and narrative that sit behind them. ‘The Golden Record’ arguably sits as the most appropriate example. This curated collection of sounds and images was launched into space in 1977, its message intending to represent life on Earth to extra-terrestrial intelligence. Ultimately, the work distils a representation of humanity into a handful of selected materials. ‘Uncut’ takes this as its counterpoint. The work offers a new fictitious archive that is knowingly subjective yet flirts with the concept of the objective gaze, enabling notions of pseudoscience, performance, and the uncanny to play out. By subverting the gaze, the work proposes a return to narrative sovereignty. Power structures control visibility, in ‘Uncut’ the camera has become an observer of authority; one that reclaims who records history, and who is represented. The work does not replace one authoritative archive with another but proposes a reflective and participatory approach to representation. ‘Uncut’ recognises the impossibility of fully capturing humanity, suggesting that archives can be rethought as evolving spaces where meaning is continuously negotiated.