Sarah Ridgley — Himinn — algorithmic brushwork as cloud study

2021

Artists: Sarah Ridgley · Year: 2021 · Medium: Long-form generative art — painterly cloud and atmosphere studies · Substrate: p5.js / JavaScript with custom algorithmic brush systems; Ethereum via Art Blocks · Place: United States · Institution: Art Blocks Presents Sarah Ridgley is a media artist who works in JavaScript and Risograph print to build pictorial systems that blur the line between hand-drawn mark-making and computer-drawn structure. Her core technical contribution is a set of custom algorithmic brushes — small JavaScript routines that simulate the irregularity, drift, and weight of physical drawing tools and apply them across generative compositions. The brushes are her instrument; the algorithms are her score. Himinn (Old Norse for sky), released on Art Blocks Presents in September 2021 as a 536-edition long-form work, is her most exhibited work in the field. The algorithm composes painterly cloud studies — light, color, atmosphere — whose surface character is determined by Ridgley's brush systems rather than by sharp geometric primitives. The outputs read as paintings, not as renderings; that distinction is the point of the project. Generative art's nineteenth-century-illustration lineage and its twentieth-century-abstraction lineage meet in Himinn at the level of the brushstroke itself. Her wider catalogue extends the same approach across different formal problems: A Lullaby for Euclid and GRAPHEME on fx(hash), Eyeshadow Roses (June 2022), and a continuing practice that has been shown at the Museum of the Moving Image's Compositions in Code (2023) and at bitforms gallery's Code Chronicles (2023) in New York. The Museum of the Moving Image inclusion sits inside a specific argument the museum has been making — that p5.js and Processing are now serious enough media to warrant institutional historicization — and Ridgley's work is part of the case for that argument. She has also exhibited at Paris+ par Art Basel, Art Basel Hong Kong, the European Cultural Centre's Personal Structures (Venice) and held a residency at Gazell.iO in London. Lore Ridgley's algorithmic brushes were originally developed for her Risograph prints rather than for screen output — the Riso's specific color separations and registration drift required brush logic that respected ink behavior as well as line. The same brush systems then migrated back into her on-chain work, which is part of why the screen outputs read with Risograph's particular grain. Sources • Ridgley, Sarah — sarahridgley.com (artist site). • Art Blocks — Himinn marketplace page. • Sarah Ridgley — fx(hash) profile. • Museum of the Moving Image — Compositions in Code (2023). • FemGen — A conversation with Sarah Ridgley (Medium).