When writer and artist Felicity Castagna applied for a residency at the Australia Institute, COVID-19 had barely entered the lexicon, much less become the guiding global force of 2020.

The project that won her the residency that she's due to take up later this year is entitled Home is a Complicated Thing - a collection of essays that will draw on philosophy, architecture, cultural studies and literature to explore Australian's changing attitudes towards their homes and their communities as a result of urbanisation, migration, environmental change and isolation.

As the global pandemic bears down, the concept of home has an entire new dimension - still fraught, complex and nourishing, but also inescapably changed.

"I would also like to think about home about how we reconfigure [my project] in terms of our relationships with our home and our communities under isolation," she says.

Castagna has been exploring the concept, in some way or another, for most of her career. Growing up, her family was constantly on the move.

"I had many different homes growing up and then I spent a lot of time travelling, particularly through Asia, and experiencing different concepts of home there," she says.

Her first book was a collection of stories about those travels Asia.

Her second, The Incredible Here and Now, a young adult novel, is set in Parramatta, where she has lived, on the same block, for the past 20 years.

And her third, the Miles Franklin-nominated No More Boats is also set in Sydney's western suburbs.

"I think as somebody who's spent a lot of time out of place, being in place has been really important for me, and I guess all of it has made me think a lot about what it means to have a home and be part of a community," she says.

"Also the way on a literal level the type of home we live in and the architecture, and your community influences your sense of home, but some of those other, I guess, more philosophical and metaphorical ideas of home - the way that you see your place and home."

She's also interested in communities and places that are far removed from Parramatta, and how "major points of crisis" can reshape how we think of home.

She's about to embark, COVID permitting, on a trip to the South Coast to take part in a storytelling project.

"I'm also going to use that as a moment to talk to people about their homes, and gather interviews," she says.

"I've already done some interviewing of people in my own community and been interested in my neighbours - most of them are adults living in houses where their parents grew up and their parents before them.

"Living in the same space that has always looked the same when the whole community is changing around them - what does that mean?"

Her residency in Canberra will give her the chance to surround herself with people who are already thinking about how government policy shapes the way we live, either subtly or overtly.

And current world events will colour - if not define - what she ends up writing.

"I've thought a lot about this more broadly as an artist, not even necessarily for this collection, and I think that the best responses to this global pandemic are the ones that come at it kind of sideways," she says.

"I don't think the best art or the best essays or the best novels are going to be by people who write about this time on a very literal level.

"I think that the best work that's going to come out of here is thinking about those associated concepts in more complex and nuanced ways."