Phoenix Isla Kea (b. 2003) is a London-born Polynesian artist working across computation, sound, sculpture, and installation. With a background in photography and film, her practice examines the psychological conditions of online life, where seduction, attachment, and control are shaped by platform infrastructures and algorithmic systems.

Her recent work investigates cuteness as a form of soft power: how sweetness, femininity, and affect are mobilised to disarm, condition, and influence perception. Drawing from internet aesthetics, anime imagery, and short-form social media, Kea treats girlhood not as innocence but as a tactical surface – one that circulates desire, compliance, and power simultaneously. Blending technical systems with embodied processes, she builds web environments, manipulates found media, and produces machinic forms shaped as much by emotional intensity – obsession, longing, and rage – as by code. Alongside digital work, she has begun integrating casting and metal processes, translating synthetic, algorithmic imagery into permanence - disrupting the economy of speed, circulation, and disposability.

Alongside her studio practice, Kea co-founded and co-runs Cranberry Lemonade, a London-based collective that focuses on the playfulness of HTML, giving workshops and encouraging lightweight web practices motivated by a desire for digital agency under the conditions of a platform-led culture. Through teaching and collaborative making, she advocates for a slower, more personal relationship to technology – treating the web as a space for care, experimentation, and self-authored expression rather than extraction.