For Roberts was many things. Glass artist, sculptor, teacher, husband, friend to many and a man considered on the cusp of greatness before he was tragically killed in 2002 trying to save his dog Siddha as the pair walked along the old railway line at the back of Queanbeyan.

Neil Roberts: Chances with Glass opens at the Canberra Glassworks on Wednesday August 16, an exhibition co-curated by his wife, artist Barbara Campbell and Jane Cush.

It explores Roberts' fascination with the vulnerable quality of glass but also its potential for violence.

"Neil always enjoyed the complex characteristics of glass," Campbell said.

"And one of those characteristics … is the inherent potential for violence in glass.

"It always holds the capability for breaking, there is this visceral response to that very potentiality of if I hold this piece of glass will it break?

"Sometimes that tension can be lost in glass but Neil always appreciated that tension and worked with it as a kind of signifier for the potentiality for violence in society."

The exhibition features boxing montages transferred onto concrete dipped glass, a series of the blank spaces between boxers, a series of knives that are delicate but full of that very potential for violence.

For all who knew him, Roberts was a gentle man. In his obituary, journalist David Leser wrote "physically he was tall and imposing but in his company men could drop their guard and women could be intimate without ever feeling threatened".

He was, Leser continued, "a man forever fascinated by what it meant to be a man. Through his conversation and his art he would always ask the question, either implicitly or explicitly: what did it mean to be a good son, a good husband, a good father, a good brother, a good friend?"

For Campbell, the process of pulling the exhibition has been like "continuing a conversation" about that very thing.

She's enjoyed seeing pieces on display again - Roberts has several pieces in collections around the world, from the National Gallery of Australia, to the Canberra Museum and Gallery to the Contemporary Art and Culture Centre in Osaka, Japan.

"Neil made it very easy for me," said Campbell, herself an acclaimed visual artist; the pair were married for three years before his death.

"If I wasn't a part of his work physically, I was peripherally aware of what he was doing, I always knew what his enthusiasms were.

"He was very good at articulating those verbally and through his art."

While Campbell is drawn to all the pieces in the exhibition, she makes mention of pieces commissioned with artist Luna Ryan. In the 1990s Roberts made terracotta casts of his clutched fist and, for this exhibition, Ryan has cast those in lead crystal.

A fist perhaps clutched full of that potential violence, or perhaps one full of emotional contact.

Whichever legacy Roberts leaves with the viewer, it is one that has touched the art community of Canberra in many ways.

Neil Roberts: Chances with Glass is on exhibition at the Canberra Glassworks until October 15, 2017. A gallery floor talk will take place on Saturday, August 19, 2017, at 2pm.