Something about Annabel Dover's presence in Kettle's Yard is a little unnerving. As we talked, I couldn't help but notice the boisterous challenge that her bright red dress and hair made to the muted modernist tones of the surrounding collection. Her residency is the latest in a tradition of artist 'interventions' in the house. Since 16th January, she's been making work to complement and interact with the manicured composition that is Jim Ede's idyllic domestic creation. It hasn't been quite what she anticipated – nor, I suspect, quite what the curators bargained for.

Her work centres around the roles played by objects in social interaction: seemingly a perfect complement to Ede's philosophy of Art and Life intertwined. “David [Kefford, co-founder of Aid and Abet] thought it'd be good if I made silverpoint drawings of some of the objects” – but she hasn't. Normally attracted to objects with a story, she found the still-life-like arrangements stifling. “It's almost like they're objects for objects sake”, she told me. Not denying the beauty of the creation, she makes a valid point that, when assumed into an aesthetic arrangement, the function and past of each object is effectively eradicated.

How, then, has she found the process of intervening? “It's been really difficult... everything is so finely balanced that you could put a pea somewhere and it'd change everything.” She has hunted out, wherever possible, traces of the domestic, looking for the 'life' amongst the 'art', and increasingly becoming aware of the disparate relationship between the two. Looking for meaning-laden detritus, she tried the kitchen (to find it largely empty) but found one untouched desk, which the curatorial staff helped her look though.

Most difficult for Dover appears to be the nature of the house's preservation. “There's lots about it that's open and nice – you can sit on the chairs; it's very welcoming.” But there are taboos – things she has been asked not to allude to in her work. “It's a little bit like an artificial representation of a life' “I think of the lemon, replaced each week, to chime continually with the Miro in the lounge. “Yes... there are strict instructions on Jim Ede's preferred dimensions of lemon.” Her father, she says, loved 'logic' - as a cold, unemotional force. Her childhood was troubled (to say the least) and she was estranged from her parents from the age of 13: from early on, objects and art were, it seems, her means of fighting order. She remembers drawing her father, in miniature, leaping from items of furniture, and recalls collecting dead rats in a wheelbarrow, subverting her parents' pristine sphere.

Kettle's Yard could count themselves lucky that they've escaped such treatment. Instead, faced with objects divorced from their meaning, she's gone in search of meaning at its root. “There's very little documentation about his wife, Helen Ede. She was very ill, and latterly bed ridden, and would lock herself away – lots of people who visited didn't realise he had a wife.” This absence is one of the things which Dover has dealt with. Cuttings from a Collectors Book of Wild Flowers that Helen owned now, thanks to Dover, litter Jim's bed: a Millais-esque scene, with a painfully absent Ophelia. The interventions are small, but provocative, and reward examination. Quickly painted flower studies upstairs dissect the window display; downstairs, a comically phallic squid enjoys itself in the bath.

Is Dover sentimental about the objects of her own life? “I was... meeting my father again changed that I bit. I'm more sentimental about other people's stuff now.” There's an element of imagination and projection in her work which is exciting. “People walk round and say they'd love to live here... I think, would you?” I'd always thought I knew the answer to that – but Dover's work hints at another possibility: it asks, softly, if perhaps the cathedral and the prison might not be so different after all.

Annabel Dover's residency continues until 24th February. She is happy to talk to visitors on Wednesday, 2-4pm. Her blog: www.darkstarlit.blogspot.co.uk