PEREGRINE O’GORMLEY
La Conner, WA, (360) 770-8511 www.peregrineogormley.com
Peregrine O’Gormley grew up on 40 acres of woods and grazing land in the mountains of central New Mexico where his father taught him to carefully observe his natural surroundings. His stomping grounds included the hills and valleys in the several square mile watershed surrounding their home, barbed wire fences, rattle snakes, gopher snakes, rabbits, coyotes and fox, myriad raptors and small birds, and the odd black bear (who’d get after their beehives) plus miles of free wandering pinyon juniper woodland. In remembering his father, O’Gormley states, “My father, taught me to see. We’d peer carefully at a pinhead-sized flying insect, and he’d say, ‘A flying miracle! This minuscule thing, eats, breaths, sees, hears, has legs …six, did you count them? Did you catch the iridescence in its wings? Does it have two pairs or one? ...AND this tiny thing, CAN FLY! Unbelievable!’”
Sculpting from his early days through to the present, he first exhibited in a Santa Fe gallery in his teens. He has won multiple National Sculpture Society awards including the Pat Munson Prize for avian sculpture in 2017 and 2015, and in 2016 the Green-Wood Cemetery Award, Brookgreen Gardens, Pawleys Island, South Carolina.
O’Gormley exhibits work broadly, including, the Museum of Northwest Art, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Smith & Vallee Gallery in Edison, Washington, and Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Upcoming shows include the Birds in Art exhibition at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum and Western Visions at the National Museum of Wildlife Art.
He earned his degree in biology at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
O’Gormley now lives and works on 7 acres with his wife Laurel and their three children overlooking the Puget Sound in northwestern Washington.