This talk traces the encounters between artists and the material world. The animacy of the natural world is for many no longer in dispute. The Anthropocene and all that it implies has galvanized new audiences into recognizing how landscapes and materials speak back to us and tell us their stories. From New Materialism (Bennett 2010; van der Tuin and Dolphijn 2010) to Agential Realism (Barad 2007), the material presence of objects and things and how they are constituted has come to the foreground to unite and divide diverse disciplines. The arts are a fertile ground from which to view these developments: artmaking is both rooted in the moment of making but also reaches forward and out. Art belongs to those experiences that as Fuglerud and Wainwright (2015) note ‘sit between dreams and fantasy - a nexus of projected futures and remembrance which enfolds humans with the material world’. In conversation with the art practice of Emily Joy, this talk suggests a number of routes through these ideas: specifically looking at material, drawing and ground, and asks how materials express their stories and what role the artist has in their telling.