Play Within Constraints - a conversation with Design Assembly

by Amanda Billing May 31, 2025

A couple of months ago I was asked about the nature of Play and Curiosity in my working life by Jess Lowcher at Design Assembly. Her questions were thought-provoking - I love an excuse to think out loud about creative and artistic processes.

You can see more creativity and design content online at Design Assembly.

In the studio with work in preparation for my solo show follow-up exhibition, "Encore" (2024).

Photo: Paul McLaney

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.

With Renato Bartolomei (Craig Valentine) in my early day on Shorty. Judging by the hair, this is circa 2008. Image: © TVNZ (Shortland Street)

By the time I left the show ten years later (2014) I was no longer qualified to teach. 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.

All dressed up ass ‘Keren Emanuel’ in TVNZ’s Kid Sister, 2023. Image: Matt Klitcher © TVNZ, Kid Sister

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 artists as much as our style of expression does. My interests operate as a kind of internal constraint. However, 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. Every now and then I need to do a clear out and re-set my creative compass.

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!

And this return to the monochrome of my first 100 day project is inspiring me to create a new offer. Watch this space.

Fleur Saville, photographed on film in the studio. March 2025. Image © Amanda Billing

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.

Literally grounded with meditation and breath work teacher Jo Pearson in the studio, March 2025. Photo and hair & makeup: Alison Brewer

Right now (mid-May 2025), 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.

[Update 31st May 2025: I decided to create a drawing workshop for eight participants in my studio. It filled up in less than a week. I was so happy!]

In my studio with ink studies from this year’s 100 day project, titled “Art School, Play School”. The project began on Sunday 23rd February 2025 and finished on Monday 2nd June. Photo: Claire Robbie.

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”.

It's about staying alert, being open to - in fact, 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. My photography practice is focused on capturing the moment and you have to be immersed in flow together to do this well.

Improvisation is a way to harness spontaneity.

When it comes to my painting practice, at this point I never plan my paintings. When I put the first marks down, I'm connecting to those preferences I spoke about earlier, then I step back and consider my response. It's almost like a collaboration with the work or with myself. My Embodiment solo show emerged from this process. Every painting began in a similar way but then each one's journey to completion was different:

Sitting on the floor of my studio with work from my solo exhibition, ‘Embodiment’, held at Browne School Gallery in November 2024. The show was up for three weeks and I sold 80% of the work, thanks to my community of friends. Image © Amanda Billing

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. But what does authenticity mean in practice?

It's about being honest with yourself about your motivations. It means cultivating the kind of relationship and studio environment which lends itself to openness, friendliness, ease, connection, curiosity.

My drive towards authenticity in my photographic work comes from the style of “reportage” photography I loved to look at as a kid (Life Magazine). It was unvarnished yet beautiful. Mostly monochrome and mostly from the 1940s, 50s and 60s, the images I soaked in as a kid captured unguarded fame, the realities of battle, ordinary and extraordinary lives, apparently so different from my safe, loving world in early 80s New Zealand and able to transport me and touch my heart.

I threw myself into this style in my 100 day project in 2015: documenting real people, living their lives. Connection and curiosity are the fundamental elements in my portrait photography today. I'm never far from these reportage roots.

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.

Invoking the help of Spirits Who Tend on Mortal Thoughts as Lady M in Pop Up Globe’s Macbeth, 2018. Image: © Pop Up Globe

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 working 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?

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/