Playgrounds, a new cross-genre art book by Chloe Briggs and Lillian Davies, is something seriously superb. In just thirty-three pages, Briggs and Davies have created an accessible experience during which the reader listens carefully to a casual yet exhilarating conversation between a professional visual artist and a professional writer. As they elaborate on their connection to the history of parks, feminism and creative crafts, the reader immediately realizes the power of playgrounds to be (as Davies states in the preface) “metaphors for the spontaneity essential to creative work.”

Rich with ebullient environmental structures and sounds, Briggs and Davies share refreshing perspectives, set against the backdrop of Paris’ Parc de Belleville, on how the park as a place—and all the structures within it—inform and inspire their creative process. We as readers curiously observe, listen and attentively consider what they’re examining, be that the current gun control crises in the U.S. as it relates to public parks, the war in Ukraine and its impact on parks, or simply lovingly surveilling their children taking risks on the playground and applying all of that to their own work and lifestyle. 

At times, Briggs’ drawings, paired with the friendly spontaneity in their dialogue, resembles master musicians or composers sharing/playing with the most ancient of human  instruments—it is both story and voice,  unconcerned with constraints. To continue with comparisons, Davies’ use of the ancient literary form of dialogue is a fantastic contemporization of Plato’s Phaedrus, but with more back and forth and less patriarchal, one-sided lecturing.

All the images and sentences are in poetic dialogue as well, charged and charging with a playful momentum, vitality and breath, in the midst of expansive historical and creative insights which inevitably encourage the reader to go to a park, sit there and let it guide you to make something of your own, or just indulge in all the joyful surprises of park life. 

In the end, Playgrounds is an absolute visual and critical harvest of art, literature and research presented with clarity and sincerity, which makes this book necessary reading for those of us who prefer envisioning creativity, work and place as realms in which to consistently play. The way we once did as children.  

As Briggs puts it, “You know, I think in those drawings I made of playgrounds I was trying to mirror that, the risk-taking and the… I want to say loopiness. They are very free, and still holding onto some kind of structure of the things that I see. But then they’re improvised, you see.” 

“Loopy” is a word Briggs uses to describe various aspects of the park, as well as children’s way of playing in it. And it is a word that she conveys effectively in her drawings. But there is another unexpected “loop” present in the book, too. For, by the time the reader finishes it, and reflects upon the conversation they took part in, they’ll want to study the images more closely and read it all over again.

This is undoubtedly because resonating throughout their conversation is the will to improve the way we approach being in places, looking and listening to one another, working within constraints, parenting and, of course, playing in this enormous park of “existing,” wherein those people who curiously listen, work and play in a true ensemble, are doing us all a favor. What a rewarding loop to be involved in, reading and rereading Playgrounds.

Playgrounds is published by Drawing is Free Press. Don’t miss the authors’ upcoming talk and presentation at the American Library in Paris (in-person only): Play and Creativity with Lillian Davies and Chloe Briggs.