This is especially the case when it comes to marking 100 years since Canberra's first building fired up – literally – and began delivering power to the nation's capital. The landmark Kingston Powerhouse turns 100 on July 2, and Canberra Glassworks, which now occupies the quaint old building on Kingston's foreshore, is celebrating in the best way it knows how – with a futuristic and enigmatic exhibition that ventures 100 years from now, while still looking back at the past. Put simply, how will people look back on the art of glass a century from now?

This is the premise behind New Glass 2015: Archaeology, Excavation and the Arcane, the exhibition devised by the Glassworks' artistic director Magda Keaney. With a futuristic setting, the exhibition's displays will encourage visitors to consider how we view history, how we uncover it in the first place, and the unexpected secrets it holds. It also suggests that the new technology we take for granted today will, one day, seem outdated, and even ancient.

With this in mind, Keaney asked six very different glass artists, all with contemporary approaches to glass-making, to consider the past while looking to the future.

One such person, who has long been fascinated by the Powerhouse building, is Ngaio Fitzpatrick, an artist who often works with the theme of climate change – a perfect fit for a former coal-powered electricity plant.

She also has her own history with the building, albeit one that dates back just three years, to 2012. The specially commissioned artwork by Warren Langley that now adorns the building's smokestack, a glass tower that glows blue at night, had to be substantially repaired when two of the industrial glass panels shattered. Langley eventually replaced all 40 of the panels, and gave them to Fitzpatrick, who was then a postgraduate student at the ANU School of Art. She planned to use them in her research, which involved high-speed photographic filming of toughened glass shattering.

"I often use glass in my work, particularly industrial glass, because it's something that surrounds us and it looks really strong," she says.

"But actually, you hit it or you bump it or it's damaged or flawed in some way, it can actually explode, so it's quite fragile. There just seemed to be this intersection between the building and the environment and the themes of archaeology and excavation in particular – coal comes from deep within the earth."

She recently undertook a Thomas Foundation residency at the Glassworks, and is interested in how the building has been repurposed, "where glass is made and the public can be educated, but there's still this amazing history of this building which I didn't even know about really until I started looking at it, particularly in terms of the foundation".

To her, Langley's artwork is a beacon of both light and hope – mysteriously blue at night, but glistening crystal during the day.

"It's sort of an element of hope, in a way, [while] we're hopelessly damaging the environment," she says.

As part of her contribution to the New Glass exhibition, she was allowed to use the smokestack and the historic staircase where workers once entered the building each day. She sees the building as being made up of layers – historical, metaphorical and physical – and her work will be shown inside the smokestack itself.

"I set up this installation in the smokestack, with smoke and with these curved panels, and filmed the glass within the brick and then the smoke escaping towards the light – [they even] took the lid off the top of the smokestack so I could get the daylight streaming in. These panels have got an endless life," she says.

"I think of it as a type of poetry, where some of the images are quite abstract and so recognisable, so rather than trying to preach and push a message to people, I hope that the imagery will draw people in to think about the way that we … consume resources and energy, and you just couch it within the language of the beautiful building, and glass of course."

Another artist featured in the show is Lucy Quinn, an ANU School of Art graduate who now lives in Brisbane. She was also undertaking a Thomas Foundation residency at the Glassworks when approached, and it was the clear the body of work she was in the midst of creating fitted the bill perfectly.

"In terms of architecture and archaeology, the works that I make have a bit of a feeling to them that they are a relic," she says.

"I've been interested in relics and things that are left behind…like they might have been cast off something, or they have a sort of presence to them."

Her works often evoke honeycomb, wasps' nests or crystal structures – an organic kind of growth, where the viewer can imagine organisms growing or multiplying just beyond reach.

"[There's] this idea of natural architecture, in that it might be something that you came across in the environment as something that's evidence of a presence, like something's created it and it's been left behind, or it's been cast off like a shell," she says.

"They're not deliberately trying to directly imitate nature… it's more about having a presence, evoking something."

Although she has spent most of the past year working with the contrasting elements of clear crystal and black glass – the latter a completely opaque material that lets in no light, like onyx – for this latest body of work she has used various shades of amber.

"The interest in yellow relates to this idea of seepage, of things like wax, sap from trees, honey. Things that sort of drip, things that are enticing but also at the same time potentially a little bit gross," she says.

"I like that idea of the abject, something that is both attractive but a little bit repulsive at the same time, or it entices you but maybe it's a little bit dangerous. So I think the yellow has been quite appropriate for some of the forms I've been experimenting with."

New Glass 2015: Archaeology, Excavation and the Arcane opens at Canberra Glassworks on June 17 and runs until August 30.