Sarah Ridgley is an American generative artist based in Arkansas who writes JavaScript and p5.js programs and designs her own algorithmic brushes for each piece.,Her work explores the space between the hand-drawn and the computer-drawn, often building generative underpaintings that the program then sifts and reworks into a final image.,
Ridgley earned a law degree in 2006 before turning to art, opening a letterpress printing studio and discovering generative art while teaching herself computer programming.In 2019 she released her first blockchain work, a series of Valentines on the Stellar network, and the next year sold work on Rarible and OpenSea before moving to Hic et Nunc.,In September 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, she released Unraveling, her first NFT series on Ethereum, three animated pieces made from quadratic Bézier-curve flowers that slowly come undone.In September 2021 her cloud-study program Himinn launched on Art Blocks as her first long-form generative project. Earlier work had used a photograph as an underpainting layer, which cannot be stored efficiently on-chain, so for this project she developed an entirely new coded underpainting system to generate the clouds instead.In November 2021 she released The Lover's Case, four generative poems made with her own asemic-writing algorithm, as part of theVERSEverse gallery's inaugural collection on Foundation.
In 2022 she released GRAPHEME on fx(hash), honoring the artist Herbert W. Franke, and the 825-piece series Eyeshadow Roses at Art Basel Hong Kong.,That December she showed A Lullaby for Euclid, thirty pieces minted on fx(hash), at “FEMGEN”, an exhibition of female-identifying generative artists staged in Miami by Micol and VerticalCrypto Art with Art Blocks and Right Click Save.,She called being part of “FEMGEN” “one of the most transformative moments in my creative journey”.
In 2023 she showed Pennyland at Unit London's “The Pixel Generation”, a series centered on individual pixels, inspired by aerial photography and named for the historical pennyland, a unit of land a farmer would pay a penny to cultivate.That March her piece Nymph, in Thy Orisons debuted at bitforms gallery in New Yorkas part of “Code Chronicles”, curated by Aleksandra Artamonovskaja.In May 2025 the Museum of the Moving Image featured her piece The Words Were Only Coordinates on its Schlosser Media Wall.In nominating her for the museum's 2024 community-curated Schlosser Wall vote, Steve Sacks described her practice as “a performative extension of conceptual art” whose software-encoded rules unfold in real time toward chance outcomes that cannot be predetermined.
