Ember Cant
Ember Cant is an emerging mixed-media artist based in Nottinghamshire, UK. Working primarily with watercolour, acrylic, coloured pencil, ink and collage, they create richly layered figurative work that moves between contemporary fantasy, folklore and the uncanny. Their practice is shaped by a strong interest in identity, embodiment, disability, neurodivergence and the ways intense internal experiences can be translated into physical imagery.
Recurring motifs include altered bodies, strange creatures, plants, bones, moths, celestial symbols and other objects drawn from folklore and personal symbolism. Their work often balances beauty with discomfort, using vivid colour and decorative detail alongside darker emotional themes.
Ember’s developing practice explores vulnerability, transformation, queerness, body disconnection and resilience, with an emphasis on making work that feels emotionally direct, imaginative and slightly unsettling.
Jellybaby is a mixed-media painting of a luminous jellyfish-child drifting through open water. The figure combines the rounded proportions and softness of a young child with the translucent bell and trailing tentacles of a jellyfish, creating something deliberately strange but gentle rather than frightening.
The piece developed from an interest in reimagining familiar fantasy creatures without relying on traditional mermaid imagery. Instead of giving the figure a fish tail, the lower body becomes jellyfish-like, allowing the human and marine elements to blend more completely. Glowing turquoise, purple and blue tones run through the figure and surrounding water, with the light appearing to come from the body itself rather than from an external source.
Although the subject is fantastical, the emotional tone is quiet and playful. The childlike face gives the creature vulnerability and warmth, while the unfamiliar anatomy keeps it slightly uncanny. That balance between sweetness and strangeness is important to the work.
Jellybaby sits within Ember Cant’s wider interest in hybrid bodies, transformation and imagined beings, but represents the softer and more whimsical end of their practice.
