Those who were at Art School with Cheryl Daley Champagnie will remember her obsession with texture. It was a theme that dominated her graduation exhibition and led her to paper-making and print-making, her later passions. To many her preoccupations seemed disparate and self indulgent but those who followed her interests closely recognised the process; the unfolding of an oeuvre that was complex, multi layered and all encompassing.
Whenever she becomes interested in an art form she must pursue it until she has conquered it, both technically and emotionally. Professor Curlee Raven Holten, has written, “I was first introduced to Cheryl Daley-Champagnie during a tour of the Edna Manley School for Visual Arts and was immediately taken by the power of her personality and her work. Shortly following my visit she came to New York to work at the famous Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. During her first visit I had the opportunity to work with her there and at my studio at Lafayette College in Eason, Pennsylvania. I observed the development of her most recent images in the Dwelling Series. She approached her work with a passion and sense of intuitive faith of an individual both delirious in her dedication and mature in her vision. I watched as she constructed the spaces of what would later house her figures, always wondering whether she placed them there to protect or to imprison them. This ambiguity seems to empower the images as we decipher their meaning and their relationship to our own lives. “ PA-S 2000