Jennifer Ridgeley was born and educated in Richmond, Surrey. She moved to Hertfordshire in her twenties, where she gained her teaching degree in the late 1960s, with art as her main subject. After giving up teaching she was able to devote more time to painting.

Since moving to Cornwall, she has expressed her fascination for the emptiness of moorland and the changing moods of the sea in paintings full of colour, movement and emotion. Her abstract works are inspired by images of space seen from telescopes, and the immensity of the earth as viewed from aircraft.