Travelling home in the car my three year old daughter turned to me and asked ‘mommy, do my toys die?’. Her question brought to mind the collection of toys she had gathered in various places at home. Some loved and carefully curated into assemblages or arrangements on window shelves or in living room corners, others discarded and heaped together in a haste to tidy up: her toys are an inevitable jumble of associated elements separated from their original parts, with pieces of wooden puzzle lying next to painted garden stones and googly eyes from craft boxes. My response to my daughter’s question was to embrace an openness to the possibility that yes, of course, toys lived and died because they change. But admittedly, this is perhaps a different kind of death than what we would normally imagine, reserved as it is for people and animals. For me, her playing with toys and their transformation was a testament to their ever-moving lifecycle. But what also struck me as important in her imaginings of her toys was the dissolution of any distinction between materials; all of it was stuff for her playing. Wood and plastic, Play-Doh and paper were of equal standing. The toys had no need to be separated out and tided in a way that kept to their original function or material unity. The contents of her toy boxes echo the incongruity of a Helen Marten sculpture, where disparate elements are brought together in a playful reimagining. Or a Margrét H. Blöndal’s work in which the materials find a new identity through a reformation, but one which holds onto their past, simultaneously. The reinvention and breaking down of how we imagine materials and their use unites these artists with child’s play. This lack of categorial distinction does however not bear out beyond the child’s or artist’s imagination. We ascribe value and meaning to different materials that radically marks them as distinct from each other. Utility is paramount here, but as is the shadow of their history and moving out from there to the values and affordances we ascribe to them. This has the effect of raising the status of some and denying that of others. Wood so often maintains a residual echo of its growth, presented in the marks and indentations of its surface in a way that allows us to cherish it as an object of beauty that belongs to the natural world. Its apparent singularity is in contrast to the ubiquity of plastic as a material. Plastic instead is a hallmark of humanity’s engineering prowess, but also, now, of our short-sightedness and the harm we can inflict.