By Ken Mammarella
The Trashy Women, a collective based in Cecil County, has been focused on making art out of recycled materials since 2004. At a recent show, members Colleen Zufelt and Trebs Thompson spoke about how they continue creating fine art when they’re no longer feeling in fine fettle. Out & About asked around and found two other local artists — artist Debbie Hegedus and singer Augustine Mercante — willing to share their evolution as well.
Augustine Mercante: ‘I had to redefine my singing voice’
Mercante in performance at the Philly Fringe Festival.
One fateful morning more than four years ago, countertenor Augustine Mercante woke up with his right ear clogged, like the feeling people have when flying before their ears pop.
He got it cleaned out by his ear, nose and throat doctor. As a singer and voice teacher at the Music School of Delaware, the Wilmington resident is at the ENT twice year, protecting critical career assets.
The cleaning produced “relief that lasted 10 minutes at most,” and it was merely the first in a very long line of tests, treatments, drops and surgeries from multiple experts for a persistent problem.
His woes included a whistling sound while singing (the E flat above middle C, and some audience members told him about it as well), a sloshing sound from liquid in that ear, a leaky ear (“like a runny nose”), tinnitus and what has ended up as a 10% to 20% loss in hearing high frequencies in that ear.
“I need to feel a certain sensation,” he says, referring to the feedback that he gets from listening to himself and the adjustments he makes for his bad ear to achieve the vocal qualities he wants. It’s like realizing the differences between hearing your own voice live and hearing it recorded, he explains.
“I had to be retrained on what to look for when it felt right,” says Mercante, who goes by Gus. “I had to redefine my singing voice.” He’s retained those new skills because they’re effective.
Eventually it was diagnosed — mastoiditis, an infection of the mastoid process, the large bone behind the ear, caused by a mold infection in that parotid gland — and successfully treated.
“I am so grateful that it is not life-threatening, but it is life-altering,” he says, noting that the adrenaline produced while performing at least overrides the ringing in that ear.
— Augustine Mercante promotes his work from AugustineMercante.com.
Debbie Hegedus: ‘My art has truly saved my life’
Debbie Hegedus’ self portrait entitled “Broncho Pulmonary Aspirogillosis.”
Debbie Hegedus had to give up her work teaching art at the Newark Center for Creative Learning and Wilmington University after she was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2010. After years of meds and chemo, she is now on oxygen full-time but insists on painting and sculpting.
“My art has truly saved my life,” she wrote in an email, with details in an interview. “It gives my life meaning. I can get lost in it for hours. I am really good at sitting for hours at my easel. I can paint about my ailment and the crazy world I worry about.”
The ailment might show up in her work as, say, being hooked up to a medical device or being bound up in tubing that supplies her oxygen, a riff on way the tubing runs all over her Newark home.
Because of her meds, she shakes a lot, so she steadies one hand with the other to get the details she wants. “My paintings have been looser because it’s harder for me to control the brush,” she says.
Her weakened state made her give up on her life-size sculptures, using plaster and papier-mâché over a wire armature. “That’s a lot more physical,” she says, but she still sculpts in clay, even though she figures clay dust isn’t good for her lungs. “Sometimes, I do work in clay, because I love it.”
“Cancer has been good for my art,” she writes in an artist’s statement. “It allows me countless hours in my studio, when I can escape to a world of my own design. There, I paint my obsessions; real and imagined. I paint stories of my illness. I paint pictures about the beauty and demise of this crazy broken planet; the people, animals, forest and water. In my studio I can lose myself (or find myself) within the intricacies of minute details.”
— Debbie Hegedus promotes her work from Instagram.com/debhegedusart and the Delaware Contemporary ArtSource.
Colleen Zufelt: ‘I chose to live’
Colleen Zufelt during a trip to Italy.
For 15 years, artist Colleen Zufelt worked full time in clay and was known for her compositions, vessels and waves. For 25 years, she taught art and was named the 2020 teacher of the year at Henry B. du Pont Middle in Hockessin, just before her retirement.
In 2003, she started creating with metals, and her metalwork expanded in 2016, nurtured by several years of classes by Stan Smokler, an artist known for his steel sculptures.
She grew to love what she called “drawing with fire” with a plasma cutter, creating “wonderful metalwork, reminiscent of Roman and Greek architecture and pottery.”
And in 2022, she had a pacemaker installed. “‘No more welding,’ the doctor said, ‘It could be deadly,’ she recalls. Her response: “I chose to live.”
Zufelt, who lives near Newport, is “not a happy camper” and is seeking happiness in adjacent forms, such as pottery with metallic glazes and using epoxy to meld — rather than weld — her components.
She has so far turned out her classmates’ offers to spot-weld her pieces and is exploring a computer-controlled system called CNC for metalwork.
She also has been exploring more the potential with found objects — “I’ve been known to pick things up on the side of the road” — and upcycle them into new pieces. Upcycling is a mantra of Trashy Women, an arts collective that she belongs to, and she talked about her need to stop welding at a recent Trashy Women show at the Cosmopolitan Club in Philadelphia.
“I give them new life,” she says.
— Colleen Zufelt displays her work at ZufeltDesigns.com.
Trebs Thompson: ‘I have to tell those stories’
Trebs Thompson with her work, “Broken Arrow.”
Trebs Thompson is a visual artist known for work in stained glass and found objects. In 2013, she was diagnosed with cancer. In 2015, she was diagnosed with parafoveal macular telangiectasia, a rare condition that has taken much of her vision but not her spirit to create.
The first diagnosis “changed who I was,” says Thompson, who runs Whimsical Farms south of Newark and has been cancer-free for years. “When you get through it, it prioritizes your life. It reshapes your thinking, down to the foundation.”
The latter diagnosis changed her body. She has no depth perception. She can no longer create fine detail in her art. She can no longer see straight lines, noting that things like utility poles look like broken lines or rickrack (the zigzag braid used in sewing). Even with glasses, she can no longer read tinty type. When she does read, it’s quickly tiring. And aspects of her vision have deteriorated considerably this year.
Instead, she says, “things tell me what they want to be remade as. I call it tactile art. I have to tell those stories.” She helps tell those stories as a member of the arts collective Trashy Women.
For instance, an old mortar shell that she found at a Goodwill “drove me to my knees” with its potential. It became part of “Peace Bomb,” a traditional Tiffany-style lamp, with the mortar functioning as the base and antiwar slogans on each side of the shade. “Peace surrounding and over it.”
Then there was a vintage red TV set she spotted at another thrift store. She didn’t buy it — at first — but later woke up in the middle of the night with the vision that it should frame “The Devil Inside,” a piece about overconsumption.
She still works in stained glass, but the pieces are larger, and she no longer does leaded glass. “And I will continue adapting my art,” she says, noting that she wants to make it “accessible to all,” including people with vision issues, such as hers.
And she is enjoying an art form that’s completely different: improv through the Forgotten Squirrels.
— Trebs Thompson promotes her work at Trebsthompson.com and Facebook.com/trebs.thompson.
