As she rummages through the charred bits and surreal melted pieces, the sculptor and photographer somehow sees not the ruination of her past but the building blocks for her future.

"It's a powerful and empowering thing to make something new out of this great loss," Lee says, as she surveys "the rubbish of my house".

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Fiona Lee is the inaugural recipient of The Creator Incubator Fire-Affected Artist Residency for six months. Usually, to rent this space would cost about $360 a month. A Creator Incubator occupant, sculptor Graham Wilson, has also donated a six-month studio residency. So Lee has a creative home for at least a year.

Her last creative space was consumed by flames on November 8, when a bushfire tore through the home Lee and her partner, Aaron Crowe, had built themselves near the town of Bobin, on the NSW Mid North Coast. The couple and their three-year-old daughter Pepper escaped with little more than what they were wearing and some camping gear.

The idea of a studio residency for a fire-affected artist arose from the remains of Lee's home, when Creator Incubator founder and renowned sculptor Braddon Snape saw Lee being interviewed on the news, "walking through her burnt-out house".

Snape had been Lee's sculpture lecturer at Newcastle Art School in the early 2000s. But it wasn't just a desire to help out a former student that led Braddon Snape to the residency idea.

"Creatives are the first to put their hands up to donate for causes," Snape explains. "I wanted to do something that gives to an artist and is of benefit to an artist."

The 34 artists who work at The Creator Incubator supported the residency idea.

Fiona Lee and her family had shifted back to Newcastle, moving in with her mother as they worked out what to do next, when she heard about the residency and applied. Being awarded the residency, she said, gave her a sense of security, and a community.

"It's a nurturing space and environment, and there's a depth of knowledge here among the artists, it feels inspiring," she says.

Fiona Lee's new work is literally taking shape from the ashes. She is creating a series of large tiles that incorporate pieces of her burnt house and studio to make a statement about not just the importance of a home, but how she views climate change impacting on everyone's lives.

"It will be highly political, but it's highly personal as well," she says.

"These materials are really charged and really volatile, and are an opportunity to create a body of work that speaks really loudly and clearly."

In the weeks after the loss of her home, Fiona Lee made that statement in a very direct way, participating in climate change rallies, including dumping a pile of ashes from her home outside NSW Parliament House.

Now, in her studio, she is sifting through the pieces of her past, dividing the shards and melted shapes into categories. There is "Home", which includes children's clothing and springs from a couch. Then there is "Shelter".

"Home is where the heart is, and 'shelter' is the structure," she explains.

"Shelter" contains charred poles, the remains of tools used to build the house, and part of a window, which was "12-millimetre glass that melted into a puddle".

In "Transport", there are strange strips and lumps of metal and plastic - "that's our car" - while the melted remains of a large water tank have just gone into a mould for the first tile.

"There's some joy somehow, after the fire, in handling my possessions, even though they're totally disfigured and burnt out, they trigger memories, positive memories of my place and of my home," Lee says. "But that's only now, six months down the track. Initially I didn't want them anywhere in my sight."

At the end of the residency, Fiona Lee intends to exhibit the artworks at The Creator Incubator.

Braddon Snape is looking forward to seeing what Lee creates, "but the pleasure I get out of this is to see her back into her practice and see her well".

So in this time of self-isolation, Fiona Lee is busy shaping the reminders of loss into art.

"I'm just so grateful to have this space and this time, even during the pandemic, to slowly process all the turbulent times of the last six months," she says.