As a little girl, I spent every summer with my grandparents. They spoiled me the way grandparents do, and their favourite trick was a toy wrapped in bubble wrap, which was a toy in itself. Pure happiness.

Years later, I found that exact feeling in the work of Emirati artist, author and curator Reem Al Mubarak. One look, and I was five again: my grandfather still alive, my granny busy in the kitchen, the whole summer ahead of me. That wonderful feeling of childhood, when the smallest things could make you happy.

That is the magic of What We Left in the Sandbox, an exhibition presented by Rizq Art Initiative in Abu Dhabi. It treats remembering as a creative act, showing how memory can become a medium in its own right. Reem’s personal childhood blends with a collective one, until it becomes a portrait of everything you thought you had lost but never really did. It all lives in the simplest things, which is what makes it so touching. You walk in and suddenly want to play and dream again.

But there is more to it than nostalgia. I explored the exhibition with Reem Al Mubarak and its curator, Azza Aboualam, and together we are going wall by wall to discover the stories behind it.

Not everyone would spend an entire year studying sand. Reem Al Mubarak did, and it certainly paid off.

An Emirati artist, author and curator, she moves between poetry, sculpture and experimental materials as if the borders between them were mere suggestions. And she has quite a lot to show for it: four poetry collections, exhibitions in the UAE and abroad, and Studio Untitled, the UAE’s first female-only art studio, which she founded.

What We Left in the Sandbox, her second solo exhibition and her largest yet, brings these different sides of her practice together. Sand takes centre stage, while poetry steps off the page and becomes part of the show itself.

Every exhibition has a centrepiece, and it isn’t always the one anyone planned. Sometimes it simply takes over the moment you step into the room.

Here, it takes the form of an enormous sandcastle: a childhood dream that took quite a bit of effort to bring to life. And quite a lot of time, too — around eight months, to be precise.

Reem started working on it in March with a team of fabricators, and what followed was a parade of experiments, mock-ups and failed attempts, a few of which you can spot elsewhere in the exhibition. Beneath the sand sits a steel frame for safety, while the castle itself is made of sand mixed with a special binder to keep it from tumbling down. Quite a lot of trouble for a sandcastle, you might think. But there is a reason Reem wanted it this big.

Once the castle has finished making you feel small, your eyes start to wander, and that is when you notice the smaller sand houses. They sit on swings around the room — a clever idea from the exhibition’s curator, Azza. Two things stand out about them: they come in different colours, yet they all share more or less the same shape. Neither is an accident.

The palette comes straight from the UAE itself: pure white from Saadiyat, warm yellow from Abu Dhabi, and a soft pink that Reem mixes herself from red and white sand. She treats sand the way a painter treats pigment: collecting it by hand, sifting out the stray bits, storing it in containers and testing combinations until the shade feels right.

The shape, however, tells a more personal story. Each of these houses is an attempt to reconstruct the same home from Reem’s childhood, one she remembers vividly in some ways and can barely piece together in others. Three windows on the sides and at the front, one at the back — that much she knows for certain. But were they vertical or horizontal, round or square? That is where memory starts playing tricks. Even conversations with her family haven’t quite settled the matter, leaving her somewhere between remembering the house and reinventing it.

We keep saying that this exhibition lives somewhere between personal and collective memory. It is a lovely phrase, but a phrase is all it is until you see it at work.

And this is where Reem’s conversations with other people become particularly important. She didn’t set out only to dig through her own memories. She wanted to create something that would find its way into other people’s hearts, whoever they are, wherever they were born and however many birthdays they have had since. Because, if you think about it for a minute, we are very different, and yet oddly alike. We scraped our knees on our first tricycles. We built houses out of chairs and cushions and declared them castles. We did. And sometimes, the smallest things bring back the most memories.

Take bubble wrap: the wonderfully irresistible stuff that arrives wrapped around something important, only for the wrapping to steal the show. Reem’s interest in other people's memories found its way into these works through conversations during her residency at the Cultural Foundation. One person remembered riding a bicycle over it, so Reem borrowed her niece’s bike and tried it herself. Another remembered a grandmother who could never leave a single bubble unpopped.

Or take the white plastic chairs. The series is called We Never Used Them Properly, which, depending on how you spent your childhood, may sound very familiar. So, how did you use yours? As a defensive wall in a snowball fight? As a a makeshift stage for a poem on New Year’s Eve? Ask ten people and you will get ten different chairs. Reem and her sister had their own version.

These stories strike a lovely balance between hers and ours, though getting there wasn’t entirely straightforward. Curator Azza helped make sure the exhibition never became so personal that visitors felt like outsiders peering into someone else’s childhood. After all, the idea wasn't just to show what Reem remembered, but to give everyone something of their own to recognise.

Of all the works in Reem’s sandbox, there is one I want to return to before we leave. Not because it is more personal than the others (though it is), but because it was the hardest for Reem to create, both technically and emotionally. And perhaps because it tells a story she rarely shares. It is called Call Me That Again.

When Reem was little, her grandfather used to call her Freyha, “the happy one”. She remembers him, and she remembers the name he gave her. What she doesn’t remember is the moment itself: the one she has tried to recreate from conversations with her family and fragments of a childhood she can no longer fully recall. And it is precisely this strange, slightly painful nature of memory that Reem wanted to capture in her work.

Visitors can move the pieces around, trying to put the picture back together. There is just one catch: a single piece is locked in place, meaning the picture can never be fully completed. Much like the memory itself.

This isn't the final piece in the exhibition. There are others: the poem half-washed away by the sea, the tic-tac-toe where you used to play to win and now play to lose, the pink glass house. But, like memory itself, this exhibition doesn’t need to be explained in full.

The mystery, and the beauty, are yours to discover. Which may be the loveliest way to leave Reem’s sandbox. You might forget the details. You might even forget the moment itself. But sometimes, years later, you still remember how someone made you feel.