There is a saying that we are all just kids wearing adult bodies. And the older I get, the more I feel how true that is. My grandmother can sit for hours remembering herself as a schoolgirl — skipping class, getting scolded by her mother for not being obedient enough, recalling tiny details from decades ago. Certain memories stay surprisingly vivid — from the toys we slept with to moments so small you would think they would have disappeared years ago.

Artists, perhaps more than anyone, have a knack for giving those memories a second life. Sometimes childhood comes back as a familiar object, sometimes as a character, a colour, a place, or simply a feeling — sometimes in the way you used to doodle sitting at your desk next to your school friends, and sometimes from the dreams you had as a child that never quite came true.

And that is exactly what we wanted to look at: how different artists return to childhood in their work, and the wonderfully different shapes those memories end up taking.

Ihab Ahmad's relationship with art started when he was eight, doodling in school notebooks instead of paying attention in class. Years have passed, but not much else has changed — even as an adult, Ihab still returns to that same habit. Only now, those notebook scribbles have grown into paintings populated by fish, birds, eyes, trees, flowers, animals and geometric shapes, and have travelled the world, earning him fans along the way. The figures still look wonderfully naïve, the colours are still bright — some publications have described his style as a meeting point between childhood joy and adult craftsmanship, which feels pretty spot on.

But all that cheerfulness isn't there because Ahmad's childhood was only fun and games. When he was young, his family was forced to leave Lebanon for Cyprus before eventually finding their way home. And it seems that even then, drawing became a way of creating something cheerful when the world around him wasn't. It is an instinct that has stayed with him: as Ahmad has shared, when life gets dark, he tends to do the opposite.

That is what happened back then, and it is still what happens today whenever life gets difficult. Talking about his exhibition I Put My Brain On Pause!, he shared that while his mother was battling cancer, he deliberately surrounded himself with funny, uplifting people, describing their energy as a kind of medicine. His art seems to work in much the same way: taking something difficult and answering it with something joyful. Just like he learned to do as a child.

For Ali Banisadr, childhood didn't simply provide memories to paint — it shaped the way he sees and creates. Born in Tehran in 1976, he spent his early years there during the Iran – Iraq War, surrounded by air-raid sirens, explosions and the physical vibrations of bombings. Whenever the alarms went off, Banisadr and his mother would head to the shelter, where he would sit and draw while listening to what was happening outside. He later connected these experiences to his synaesthesia — a phenomenon where one sense triggers another — explaining that sounds would appear to him almost as visual forms and colours.

And that childhood instinct never really left him. Back then, he responded to frightening sounds through lines and marks; today, he still translates what he hears and senses into something visual. Quite remarkable, really — decades later, a fifty-year-old artist is still creating through a language he discovered as a child.

There is an important caveat, though: Banisadr isn't literally painting memories of war. His works are large, dense worlds filled with fragmented figures, landscapes and almost-recognisable forms that appear and disappear across the canvas. The sounds themselves have changed, but the way he translates them into images began all those years ago in Tehran.

Yto is a Moroccan artist, and rather wonderfully, she turned out to be exactly the sort of artist I had been picturing before I even started researching this piece. Having grown up in Tangier before moving to Paris as an adult, she keeps returning to the place of her childhood in her work: its streets, its objects, its architecture, its family histories and political realities, always with an eye on how the city has shifted and changed. But what she explores isn't just her personal childhood — it is also the childhood of other kids who grew up in the same place. And that is where the children's objects that keep cropping up throughout her work come in: wooden building blocks, puzzles, sweets and handmade North African toys.

One strand of this is her North African Toys series. How was it born? Quite accidentally, actually. Barrada came across a collection of old North African toys at the Musée du Quai Branly — mostly items gathered by French ethnographers back in the 1930s. These weren't shop-bought, factory-pretty things. They were made by hand, for children, often by the children themselves, out of whatever happened to be lying around. Barrada treats these small objects as art in their own right, lifting children's play straight into the space of contemporary art and asking us to take their ingenuity seriously as a genuine way of making form.

The fourth name on our list is Lebohang Kganye — a South African artist who keeps childhood memories and fantasies close to the heart of her practice, transforming both what she lived through, and what she wished she had lived through, into art.

One project that fits our story perfectly is Mohlokomedi wa Tora. As a child, she heard a lot of stories from her grandmother and aunt about family members and events that had happened before her time. The project goes back to those childhood memories and transforms the stories she once had to imagine into a constructed reality — life-size, theatrical installations made from photographic cut-outs, cardboard and light. One of the central figures is her grandfather, whose life she knew largely through what other family members had told her.

Another project turns to someone even closer to her heart — her mother. After her mother passed away, when Kganye was around twenty, she began looking through old family photographs and made a rather striking discovery: some of the very clothes her mother was wearing in them were still sitting at home. For Ke Lefa Laka: Her-story, Kganye put those clothes on herself, recreated her mother's poses and spliced the new images into the old photographs. Suddenly, the mother she remembered looking at and admiring as a little girl and the woman she had grown into could exist in the same frame — side by side, as if time had folded in on itself.

To close out our journey back to childhood, we land on Adra Kandil — and this time, there isn't a toy, a school drawing or a bedtime story in sight. Kandil's tie to those early years works rather differently: the Lebanese artist takes her memories of the Beirut she knew as a little girl, blends them with stories passed down from her family, and uses both to conjure a version of the city that hovers somewhere between reality and nostalgia.

You can spot those memories scattered right across her work. Her dreamlike digital collages weave together old photographs, newspapers, flowers, coffee cups, classic cars, Air Liban tickets and familiar Beirut streets — fragments of the visual world she associates with home and the past. Kandil has said her memory is a deeply sensory thing, built from feelings, scents and sounds, and that it tends to grow rosier with time. So rather than pinning down one particular childhood scene, she gathers up all these little pieces — some remembered, some simply inherited — and builds the Beirut that lives on in her head.