I ate a small tub of pineapple from Tesco’s on the street corner of Whitfield Street having spoken to my mum on the phone. I enjoyed the balmy air of May, heavy with the rain that was to come the following day (the day of the Coronation), my skin tacky with a thin layer of sweat and dirt and city grime accumulated in the thirty-minute walk down Euston Road.

I arrived at Fitzrovia Gallery straight after 8 hours of considering and discussing art hungrily with my peers in my final tutorial of five years of studying Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. I had considered the queer references in work that were overwhelmingly underwhelming and arguably an homage to coding and digital printing - although, a sign of the times that half-tone printing is now considered digital and not manual as it originally was.

Arriving at the gallery I was conscious of catching little clips of the facade, the exhibition poster, the press release, and the artists’ book. For the reel, don’t forget the reel. I identified Kate, a woman in a soft white shirt chatting and welcoming people, as Kate of Daisy Laing Gallery who had invited me to speak here this evening and to interview the artist. I identified the artist, hair pulled atop her head, broad grin, and summer dress. Fran Rowse.

Shake hands, put the bag away in the back, and a paper cup of water.

Hug Fran, shower in congratulations and compliments, and discuss the work - but save some for the interview.

Fran and I got on immediately. Fran is my age. She’s 23 from Cornwall. This collection of photographs, in a documentary style reminiscent of the early 2000s BBC panoramas, is part of her ongoing long-term series ‘Maids’. The title is taken from the colloquial term used for young women in rural Cornwall, a county famed for its beaches and coastline and as a tourist trap in the summer, when the middle class of the South take up residence in Air BnBs and holiday homes providing the gig economy with its seasonal work.

In these photos, girls from the age of four up to their early twenties are pictured in their homes and homeland against the monochromatic backdrop of traditional patriarchy and poverty. Fran creates the space for them that she wishes she had then and now. Motivated by a desire to celebrate her peers, to facilitate them being the centre of attention in a culture with a complicated relationship with the role of women in labour. Fran explains to me how the original Cornish Maids were the women who sorted the tin mined by the men, described as fresh with clean-pressed cotton dresses and white bonnets and not as the rag-wearing, sack-wearing, blinded by the dust impoverished women that they were. Part of her work includes finding archived photos and records of these Cornish Maids and integrating these archival pieces with her own stark photographs shot on a second-hand Canon.

Aside from the stoic expressions, pale skin, and mud-clad feet, one thing is consistent and eye-catching - the garish prom dresses each girl wears. A slightly satirical commentary on the coming-of-age rituals across the Western world which glamorise young girls and drip them in diamantes, Fran never experienced prom or anything similar for herself, she lived that vicariously through others - through the older sister of a friend who stumbled down the stairs in a meringue of tulle, head piled high with ringlets and feeling beautiful, glamorous, happy.

When Fran describes the uncaptured moments on these photoshoots, they are the playful joy that you would expect of young girls playing dress up and tripping over horse manure in kitsch kitten heels. This contrasts so beautifully with the solemn, tired, robust and resilient expressions that each girl has.

This work offers a new perspective, a light-hearted haze settles on an overlooked community, the sobering realities made more so by the considered and deliberate ties made by the artist between the historic and the present. To see this work in London, to celebrate Fran and her creative tenacity to strike out as an artist and photographer driven by the need to represent her nieces, her friends, and herself, all whilst maintaining a lightness, and an infectious and wicked sense of humour and irony is engaging and energising and I sincerely look forward to seeing what she creates next.