Alexandra Eldridge creates richly layered paintings that explore the territory between the visible world and the realm of the imagination. Drawing upon poetry, mythology, dreams and the natural world, her work moves between the familiar and the mysterious, bringing together human figures, animals, botanical forms and recurring symbolic motifs in compositions that resist a single interpretation.
Working across painting and mixed media, Eldridge builds surfaces through layers of paint, Venetian plaster, vintage imagery and found material. Birds, flowers, animals, dresses, ladders and fragments of architecture appear and reappear throughout her work, forming a personal visual language in which memory, imagination and lived experience coexist. Her paintings often possess the quality of dreams: recognisable elements emerge from atmospheric spaces, while shifts in scale and unexpected juxtapositions create a sense of worlds existing just beyond ordinary perception.
Literature has long been central to Eldridge's practice. Her work draws upon writers and poets including William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Rainer Maria Rilke and Rumi, alongside Jungian ideas of the psyche and traditions of mythology and mysticism. Rather than illustrating these sources, Eldridge uses them as points of departure, allowing image and language to open new possibilities for meaning.
The natural world provides another enduring thread. Animals and birds frequently occupy the same psychological space as their human counterparts, while more recent work has increasingly considered our relationship with the living world and ideas of kinship, renewal and rewilding. Throughout, Eldridge returns to the possibility of transformation and to what she describes as finding "the inherent radiance in all things… the extraordinary in the ordinary."
Born to artist parents, Eldridge studied art and literature at Ohio University and continued her education at Cambridge University and the Santa Reparata Graphic Workshop in Florence. In the early 1970s she co-founded Golgonooza, a centre for the arts inspired by the philosophies of William Blake. Travel has remained an important influence on her work, including artist residencies on the island of Elba, Italy, and at the Valparaiso Foundation in Almería, Spain.
Eldridge has presented more than forty solo exhibitions and exhibited internationally in cities including London, Paris and New York. Her work has featured in many highly regarded publications including ARTnews, Art on Paper, New American Paintings and American Art Collector, and is held in private collections across the United States and internationally.
Her exploration of the relationship between art, language and the imagination also extends into published books. She collaborated with poet Tony Barnstone on The Radiant Tarot and with Jungian analyst and author Sherry Salman on The Oracle of Rewilding, which received a 2025 Foreword INDIES Gold Award. Her forthcoming book, Alchemy of the Divine Feminine: Vision, Voice, and Numinous Transformation, brings her paintings into dialogue with poetry and prose by women spanning centuries and cultures, and will be published by Weiser Books in June 2027.
Eldridge lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.