The artist’s latest personal project, Cygnets, introduces us to a collection of photographs of young people – mostly girls – from highly privileged backgrounds and on the cusp of adolescence. Taken in domestic spaces including gardens, kitchens and bedrooms, the images are like film stills; staged and steeped in rich, cinematic light. All the clichés of upper-crust life are present and correct: verdant lawns, white picket fences and grand rooms with high ceilings. But in among these all-too-perfect societal stages, we see girls cautiously performing versions of themselves for Magowan’s camera. These images possess, as Magowan puts it, "a deceptive superficial beauty undercut by a subtle anxiety". In this world, being a child means adhering to the pressures of obligation and expectation placed upon you by your elders, while trying to retain some of that dwindling childhood fantasy and innocence. There is plenty of space to dream, Magowan says, so long as those dreams conform. As if restrained imagination were the ideal. The images in Cygnets are harbingers of the self-conscious women these young people are being moulded into. They are told they should be pretty and successful, strong and poised, and we can already see them performing rituals of beauty like placing cucumber slices on their eyes and preening themselves in the mirror. Magowan has entered the lives of these girls at a particular stage, for a particular reason: she was raised in the same world. Through these girls, she is making sense of her own teen experiences.