But its creator, Kirstie Rea says the piece – entitled Identity – the Swim – was mainly driven by nostalgia, for the outdoors, for childhood, for the scented air and vivid colours of the Canberra landscape.

"It's about dipping your toe into that freezing river, it's about sitting on that little bit of sand. It's all about that," she says.

In fact, if there is a thread running through her three-decade career, it is her mission to understand her surrounds.

"I see it really as an ongoing theme that underpins it all. That is, it's kind of – it's a bit old hat to say – but it is about a sense of place, a sense of belonging, and an investigation into my local, that really knowing and loving the local."

For Rea, the local has always been Canberra where she was born in 1955. She grew up at the foot of Red Hill, and can remember when Woden was sheep paddocks.

"I had parents that, even though they were super busy, loved getting out and about, so [I remember] being shown the value of the bush," she says.

"I can remember being up in the Brindabellas, just in awe of the wildflowers and dad saying, 'If you pick them, there won't be any for anyone else'. Really lovely little things like that, and mum was always a really outdoorsy person, so we spent a lot of time outside. All our birthday parties were at the river."

Today, after a lifetime of creating and teaching in glass, that idyllic upbringing still bleeds into her work, even if it's not always evident to the casual observer. And her studio, on a horse farm at Pialligo, with apricot trees by the window, is a constant source of inspiration, and she's been there since 1987.

"Even though I travel a lot overseas to teach and it's great, it's fantastic, it's brilliant, and I feel really lucky to do it, I love coming home," she says.

"I can easily spend a day walking around Jerrabomberra or Black Mountain, wherever. I'm also an avid native orchid hunter. I just love it."

Rea's father was a journalist in the press gallery at Parliament House, running a verbatim news text agency.

"We all worked for him as kids, but I went on to work for him for the first 10 years after leaving school," she says.

"I didn't go to art school until I was 28, but before art school, I was heavily involved in stained glass, so I already had a love of glass and colour and light, really."

She did classes with Craft ACT, back when it was located at the Watson Arts Centre, and learned about contemporary German stained glass, which at the time was leading the world in architectural glass work. She travelled overseas in the late 70s and early 80s, and remembers on her last day in London going to the Victoria and Albert Museum to see the 1979 New Glass Review.

"I've been in it a number of times in the intervening years since then, but I walked into the V&A and went, 'how did they do that?'" she says.

"And also travelling around Britain, I'd seen my first hotshops, and I arrived back in Australia and they were just starting a course at ANU."

Klaus Moje, a German glass master, set up the School of Art Glass Workshop with a view to eventually having a hotshop, and Rea was in the first group of just five students, who were taught by two lecturers.

Moje ran the course with the artist Neil Roberts, who, at the time, was working with glass, but would later move onto sculpture (Roberts died in 2002 after being hit by a train in Queanbeyan).

"Neil and Klaus couldn't have been more different in their approaches to making and thinking about making," Rea says.

"Klaus was really about the material and the object and getting to know a process and a technique and then you were, in his words, free to swim with it. You really need to master those skills," she says.

"And Neil would say, 'Stop looking at it, Kirstie! Chop it up, drop it on the floor! Why do you want to make it?' All that conceptual stuff. It was a really nice balance between the two, but also it created some heated discussions in some exhibitions."

She says both artists – working as a type of double act – helped to shape her practice early on. She graduated in 1986 and straight away went into teaching on the program, at the request of Moje.

"I taught from '87 right through to 2003, just permanent part-time, but it was the best of both worlds because I could work here and keep developing this studio, and travel, which I've done a lot," she says.

"I really love teaching, and it's always been half my practice and still is."

She later became the first creative director of the Canberra Glassworks, when it was established in 2006, but lasted less than two years before she realised it was taking her away from what mattered the most.

"I resigned in very early 2008. It was also supposed to be a 20-hour-a-week job, I was working 60 hours. You can imagine what the glassworks was like in the set-up stage, it was hideous … I was spending no time here at all."

She remembers coming to her studio between Christmas and New Year to catch up on some work, just in time to see the first apricot ripen on the trees she'd planted outside the window.

"I thought, if I hadn't been here I would have missed that apricot, and I value that more," she says.

Like many artists, she's always had to find a balance between making art and making money, although through teaching, she's usually able to combine the two.

She has just been announced as the most recent recipient of the $15,000 CAPO Fellowship, awarded by the Capital Arts Patrons' Organisation, a non-profit that has been supporting ACT artists for 30 years and disbursed more than $2 million in the process.

Rea will put the money towards a major survey being staged next year covering two decades of her work – the same year she turns 60, a fact that still amazes her.

She plans to create several new works for the show, but regrets that many of her best works are now with collectors in the US – including, it must be said, the noted glass art collector Elton John.

She's also been branching out in recent years, and doing more drawing. Her large blank-walled studio allows her to draw onto the wall and stand back to look, as a way of developing concepts, and today, there are two rakes leaning against the wall – one with glass rake marks hanging down, the other with the marks drawn on.

"I hate to say it, but being financially free of odd commitments – of flying here and there to teach – it really freed up my mind," she says, of the times when she's had enough money to focus on exhibitions.

She lives alone in a small cottage in Queanbeyan, a solid member of the burgeoning arts community there, with regular swimming dates and catch-ups with fellow artists over difficult patches of work, or conceptual tight spots.

But while she loves being part of a community – it's just as important to her to have time to sit in silence.

"That time is important, and again, it comes back to that balance," she says.

"And maybe because I've taught so much too, I do value that [glass-making colleagues] come in and give me input, because as a teacher you're always trying to stretch your brain for a student, and say, what pathway can I send them on, whether it's conceptual or technical or material investigation?"

Just as important is the chance to roam. While she doesn't intentionally isolate herself – she shares her studio complex with another glass artist, Lisa Cahill – she does value her solitude. With no children and no partner, it has always been important for her practice and her sense of self to be free to roam, artistically and spiritually.

"I think in every sense I like that … I love that sense that mentally I could totally roam with that conceptual stuff behind the work, and that comes from physically roaming," she says.

"I also think that [about] the travel overseas, to places that are so different to here, because I can remember being for a long time in the Alps in Europe and just thinking, 'I feel so hemmed in, so hemmed in by these mountains. They're stunning but it's just not mine'. The buildings were narrow like this, and the little room was this wide, and everything was squashing in and there were more people. So it's a really great contrast for me to feel and experience that and then come back here and just feel the openness and that sense of space, and there are so few people."

Even if she spends a whole day outdoors, she knows deep down that she is still working.

"Because I normally take a sketchbook with me, a notebook, I photograph tons … Sometimes when I'm photographing, I'll just use my lens to just blur everything and only get colour, and you go that's what I remember about that day, or that place, it was just those soft colours, or those really washed-out colours of a hot day."

She is trying to work out how to encapsulate the idea in her work of sending someone the sweet Canberra mountain air she loves so much – stuffing it in an envelope, or a poster tube – but all in glass.

"It's about absence and presence and that translucency of glass and shadow. I really wanted to develop that thing of absence and how I tried to send you this air which was present, but I don't know. I'm yet to write the words on that."

Her work has always been sculptural – she has never created vessels – and she never developed a love of blowing glass in the hotshop. Although learning how to blow was the reason she enrolled in the ANU course in the first place, it wasn't until her fourth year that Moje found a furnace that was to his satisfaction, and by then, her direction with kiln-forming and cold-working techniques was set. But she's aware that her work has moved around thematically throughout the years, and this is sometimes a risk for even an established artist.

The jump between rakes and fabric-like swaths, or tines and geometric shapes isn't as large as some people think. "It's that sense of outdoors-ness, the sense of nostalgia creeping into the work," she says.

Last year, she presented an exhibition at the Canberra Glassworks called Under My Skin, as part of the Canberra Centenary Celebrations.

"That really was a nostalgic show, because being Canberra born and bred, I said I'm really going to use this as a chance to be nostalgic, and look at things I did as a kid."

One of the works, Apricots – Abundance, is inspired by the apricot tree in her family's garden when she was growing up. It's an empty vessel, with a winding ooze of apricot coloured glass running down off the shelf. It evokes, she says, nothing more than 'apricotness', the taste and sensation of eating an apricot, ripe off the tree, bottled or frozen.

Kirstie Rea will be opening her studio, along with fellow Hayshed artists Lisa Cahill and Julie Ryder, on Saturday November 23 from noon-2pm, as part of DESIGN Canberra.