5 minutes with Amanda Billing
In line with this month’s Autumn Conversations events, we’re sharing stories that reflect the theme of Design & Discovery. In this interview we sat down with creative slashie, Amanda Billing on creating opportunities to play, make, and discover and how that has shaped her career as a photographer/artist/actress.
Kia ora Amanda. Can you share a bit about your background and your day job(s)?
I’m definitely a “slashie”, partly out of interest and partly out of necessity. In order to stay flexible enough to audition and then work as an actor, it suits me best to be self-employed.
When I finished my studies in Geography at Canterbury University back in 1998, I wasn’t sure what to do next. So I did what many people with BA do and I went to Teachers College. I worked for a few years, getting burned out and quitting, then going back.
Somewhere along the line I met a bunch of actors, auditioned for a professional play with absolutely ZERO experience, got the job, got an agent, got some ads, finally booked my OE and then promptly got a core cast role on Shortland Street.
By the time I left the show ten years later (2014) I was no longer qualified to teach – or do anything else for that matter! – and regular acting work didn’t exist outside of Ferndale so I have had to follow my interests and develop skills by being an autodidact and learning the way I do best: on the job.
As a self-employed person I do a few things: I take photos, I make art and design merch, I do the occasional voice over. I audition for ads, television, and film; this is unpaid unless we get a recall but if we get the job, it’s great. Auditioning is fun and nerve-wracking in equal measure. It’s like a lottery in some ways but you know what they say: You gotta be in to win.
What role does curiosity play in your creative process, and how do you cultivate it when there are no external constraints?
I think it’s important to engage with novel, mysterious things on a regular basis. The question “what if?” drives me all the time, I think. It comes naturally to me and I create constraints for myself. I trust my preferences and allow myself to be drawn towards things that interest me.
I think our specific interests distinguish us as creative people as much as our style of expression does. My preferences operate as a kind of internal constraint. I’m interested in so many different things and that can be a problem actually. My curiosity can get very undisciplined and makes me feel scattered sometimes. Curiosity can sometimes lead to clutter and unfinished business rather than curated collection.
I don’t think too much curiosity is a bad thing but I do benefit from putting some limits on it for myself, both in my personal art practice and in my photography business.
I re-write my artist statement a couple of times a year and always define the parameters of any artistic research or collection. I’ve learned to niche down a little in my portrait practice but I get bored and stale if I don’t develop new offers at the same time. Recently I’ve started to use my Dad’s film camera and that analog process is very good for me because it involves more limits than I’m used to in our digital world; getting a roll of film back feels like Christmas!
Can you share a time when an experimental or passion project led to an unexpected opportunity or shift in your career?
This has happened a few times, actually, partly because I have never really had “a plan”. Looking back I can see there that there IS a logical progression, it just didn’t feel like it at the time.
Acting came out of a friend’s invitation/provocation. It was an opportunity to reconnect with something I was really invested in as a teen but had become disconnected from. It developed over the space of six months or so with work here and there, then I finished the school term on a Friday and started at Shorty on Monday. The shift was seismic.
My photography 100 Day Project in 2015 is another experiment which shifted my working life, but over the space of years. When I look back now, I can see what a huge commitment it was. I would shoot every day with a different person or in a different situation, then go home to edit and post pics to Instagram every evening. I could only have done it when I was single lol. I enjoyed it so much that I kept going and eventually people started commissioning me to take their picture.
Now it’s a true vocation and I make sure it stays lively and fresh. Even with a client who wants something relatively conventional, the art is always there: working with natural light, directing with humour and sensitivity, the craft of editing. Portrait photography is about creating relationship as much as technical skill – arguably more so.
Right now, I am doing another 100 day project, this time focused on other people’s art lessons. It’s making me feel like it might be time to teach again. The wheels are in motion already, actually: as I type this I have a class and a retreat lined up in collaboration with my friend Claire Robbie at The School of Modern Meditation in Auckland. I’m excited and scared. Perhaps there’s another seismic shift brewing.
Sidebar: my friendships have offered opportunities and major shifts as much as my own self-directed creative projects – that’s a whole story in itself.
Have you discovered any personal values or design principles through play and exploration that now guide your professional work?
Improvisation probably isn’t a value as such but I consider it the core principle of all of my jobs. It’s arguably a “design principle”: staying alert, being open to – expecting – change. Improvisation is a way to harness spontaneity. That might sound like a contradiction but that’s how it feels to me: it’s a kind of jazz, being able to play within a framework. I used to be afraid of improv as an actor but now I do it in auditions all the time. I think I’ve gotten better at following impulses without worrying so much if things don’t “work out”, partly thanks to my art and photography practices.
Authenticity is a word that’s bandied about a lot these days but I would say that’s a big value, especially in my portraiture practice. What does authenticity mean in practice? Cultivating the kind of relationship and studio environment which lends itself to openness, friendliness, ease. My drive towards authenticity comes from the style of “reportage” photography I loved to look at as a kid (Life Magazine) and which I threw myself into in that 100 day project in 2015: documenting real people, living their lives.
Presence is essential to everything I do. It’s a sense of connection and an open awareness. When I’m being a photographer, it’s the connection between me and my subject as well as awareness of my situation and what the light is doing. When I’m making art it’s connection with my materials and with the evolving composition in front of me. I don’t execute fully formed ideas, my work is made through process and experimentation.
When it comes to acting, well, presence and authenticity are the name of the game and even when there’s a script, improvisation is happening.
If you could remove all limitations—time, budget, expectations—what would be the next thing you’d create purely for yourself or the world or a community?
I’d give money to as many private art and creativity schools and businesses as I could, so they could develop the programmes they dream of delivering. And pay their teachers HEAPS so that more people want to be art and creativity teachers, so that people can go to even more amazing night classes.
Night classes changed my life and, in the face of this AI tsunami (say it like Parker Posey), more and more we are going to need places to work with our hands and minds, make art, and connect with other people.
(Then I’d build myself a live-work house-studio thing for me and my partner. And I’d employ all my clever friends to write and make the TV show idea I have bubbling away – where I’m the lead, obvs.)
Lastly, what’s the best way for folks to see more of your work and connect with you?
You can find me at www.amandabilling.co.nz – sign up to my mailing list via the pop up; I won’t spam you.
I’d love to take your picture: www.amandabillingphotography.co.nz
I’m on Instagram daily: @_amandabilling_ (everything I do) and @_intomeandsee_ (photos)
I’m also on LinkedIn and would love to connect with you there. https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanda-billing-artist/
Photo credit: Paul McLaney
More from the Design & Discovery series:
