Suzanne Jongmans does not imitate silk with a cheaper textile. She takes the foam that protected a parcel, sews it, folds it and sculpts it until it behaves almost like a garment painted in the sixteenth century.
Then she sometimes leaves the recycling symbol visible.
That small contradiction carries much of the work. Her portraits borrow the frontal poses, bonnets and collars of Old Master paintings, but the costumes are built from foam, plastic, fruit-protection mesh and other materials normally headed for the bin.12
The material is not only an environmental message. It changes how the costume has to be made.
She does not sew foam like fabric
Jongmans works across dressmaking, sculpture, costume and photography. Her site describes an important fabrication accident in 2007. While testing a costume, she ran out of fabric and picked up thin sheets of packing foam she used to protect her artwork.1
Once sewn, the material stood upright. Instead of falling like cloth, it immediately formed volume.
Jongmans began to sculpt her garments. Foam can create a rigid bonnet, collar or drape without the construction a conventional textile would need. She describes it as beautiful against the skin, almost silk-like, while also behaving as a protective layer around the model.1
There is a useful method hiding in that accident: a substitute material does not have to reproduce the original material's behavior. Its failure to behave correctly can become the new technique.
The industrial markings stay in the portrait
The photographs reference Rembrandt, Holbein the Younger, Rogier van der Weyden and other traditions from fifteenth-, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century portraiture.1
But Jongmans does not completely transform packaging into a historical illusion. Letters, recycling marks and industrial printing can remain visible. Her site explicitly connects those traces with reuse and mass consumption.1
In newer work, Colossal also notes mesh sleeves used to protect fruit, copper coils extracted from motors in discarded appliances, and fuses.2
The portrait then works at two distances. From across the room, it reads as an old image. Up close, the contemporary material starts speaking again.
Photography completes the transformation
The garment is only one stage. Jongmans builds a three-dimensional object, dresses the model, then flattens the whole construction back into a photograph.1
Dark framing and quiet poses pull the result closer to historical portraiture. Her site also describes works assembled from hundreds of detail photographs and extensive post-production, with photographic layers functioning a little like layers of paint.1
“Recycling” almost undersells the craft. The work is not just about rescuing a material. It requires understanding its stiffness, transparency and printed traces, then designing around what it can actually do.
Packing foam was made to wrap and protect an object in transit. Jongmans keeps exactly that property, then pushes it until the packaging can become a five-century-old bonnet.