It's humming in the way it would once have hummed, back when it was Canberra's sole generator of electricity, the centre of a tiny universe, standing sentry as the city grew around it.

The Kingston Powerhouse, as it once was, then stood deactivated, vacant and untouched for 50 years, keeping its stories - both told and untold - close.

And now, it's a hive of creativity and ideas - a glass studio filled with artists, art lovers, ghosts and stories.

Sculptor Rosalind Lemoh spent six weeks there as an artist-in-residence last year, and, in her words, was in a "massive love fog" the entire time. It wasn't just the chance to learn an entirely new medium, although like many before her, she quickly became addicted to the possibilities of glass.

"It's such a busy space for making and thinking, so you're kind of in this lateral way of being," she says of the teeming, rumbling hot-shop.

"You're not just writing things down, and it's not outcomes based. It's very experimental, a kind of heat-seeking for ideas."

She was also captivated by the building itself, its vast industrial interiors, corners and rough edges overlaid with the modern detritus of the glass world.

It was, she thought, like a gatekeeper of memory of story, a "silent narrator" holding onto its form and function, and the countless stories - both told and untold - of the people who had passed through its spaces.

"There're so many textural details, and there's so much history to it," she says.

"It's always been a building that's captured my imagination. And then thinking about the body, the building as an extension of a body, is a really interesting thing for me."

Lemoh's new exhibition, Told. Retold. Untold., explores the building's history through objects she's recast - physically and metaphorically - to form part of her own story.

Born in Sierra Leone, she moved with her family to Australia as a child, and grew up a "mixed kid", with a white mother and African father.

Later, as a student at the ANU School of Art, her practice in a sculpture changed irrevocably after a visit to her home country - the first since her family had left.

She has since been preoccupied with tools, industrial objects and the body "as a socio-political artefact".

This new exhibition taps into all of that, but with Canberra's oldest building as a hyper-local starting point.

And one that blends transparent delicacy and breathtaking technique with an enticing overlay of grit, dirty hands and workaday objects - not to mention bodily objects like casts of her own wisdom teeth.

But it was the process of sand casting - where sand is used as the mould material - that opened the door for her new body of work.

"I felt like I hit my stride, it was my kind of grittiness that I really like in a work...it was very immediate," she says.

"I realised you could keep recasting these objects and that they could continue a different story when they're in different materials."

She also learnt the process of trial, error and happenstance, as a means rather than an end. One piece in the show, I Fell From Wax To Water and Hot To Cold, features a delicate glass teardrop marbled inside with coloured wax.

While it was the result of her own vision, the artist who blew it for her, Tom Rowney, ultimately created 10 versions of her to choose from.

"I think often my experiments become the work, but here, you will always make more than you need," she says.

"So that was my choice, that drop, but there were 10 of them, and they'll probably be another work in the future."

She says she hopes her show can connect with people on multiple levels.

"It feels really special to be claiming female space and female bodies and looking at bodies as liquid and in flux and things like that," she says.

"I like this balance of fragility and grunt at the same time."