Behind the looking glass with artist Klaus Moje

To look, to see, to feel what one feels, with no explanation necessary.

No one believed this more than the great glass artist Klaus Moje.

"The way to appreciate glass [is] through looking at it," he once said.

And there is plenty to appreciate when gazing at his works. His bowls, vessels and wall panels are vivid, intricate and joyful celebrations of colour and texture. In the act of creating, he had the utmost respect for the medium, while continually pushing the boundaries of what he could achieve.

This was the philosophy he also applied as a teacher - combining form with function, technique with aesthetic, but maintaining a discipline that came from his early training at his family's glass-grinding factory in Germany. His experience spanned glass as a trade and then as an artform; as an artist, and as a teacher, the two strands were inextricably linked.

His devotion to colour and the innovation in his works was unusual enough to be rejected from a prestigious triennale in his native Germany in the late 1970s. But, more than 40 years later, by the time of his death in 2016, Moje was considered one of the world's most important contemporary glass artists.

Nola Anderson, who taught art history alongside Moje at the Australian National University School of Art in the 1980s, has long wondered about his approach to the medium - about his heritage, nature, nurture, inspiration, and ultimate motivation as an artist.

Her beautiful, lavishly illustrated new book, which she began working on with Moje in 2013, three years before he died, sets out to answer this question: Why did Klaus Moje work the way he did?

"There were these artistic influences going on at the time, or there were these events in his life, or there were these social movements - you can answer that question in a lot of ways. So I wanted to look at a couple of things to answer for myself - why is Klaus's work like this?"

Anderson has enjoyed a long career in the arts. She taught art history at the School of Art, was head of national collections at the Australian War Memorial, and chair of the Canberra Glassworks, an institution Moje himself was instrumental in setting up.

But it was working alongside Moje in those early days, when he had been brought over from Germany to set up the school's glass workshop, that informed her own fascination with glass as an artform.

It was a time when the school was at something of a crossroads, poised to choose one academic approach over another. But then-director Udo Sellbach was au fait with the Bauhaus - the early 20th-century German art school that, on principle, aimed to combine craft and the fine arts, aesthetics with everyday function.

"Udo Sellbach wanted to design the School of Art along those principles, which is basically having workshops which are led by an artist who is a specialist in that field," Anderson says.

"He travelled to Germany to meet Klaus, with the view of inviting him back to head up the glass workshop."

It was to be an auspicious appointment; under Moje, the workshop would become world-renowned, producing a generation of technically skilled and innovative artists.

"We were very lucky that Udo had that vision, and that he brought Klaus out," Anderson says.

"Klaus was there for 10 years, and that gave us a tremendous base of students who were graduating from the School of Art who were just so finely skilled in the craft of glass as well as the aesthetics.

"Klaus would approach it in two ways. He'd say you need to know the alphabet before you can write a sentence, you need to know how to make this stuff really well. But you also need the ideas. You need to know both together."

We're speaking early in the year, weeks after the publication of Glass: The Life and Art of Klaus Moje, a book she's been working on for the past eight years. Her subject has been gone now for five years, but his legacy - his body of work, the Canberra Glassworks, the School of Art Glass Workshop - is part of the fabric of Canberra, the city he made his home after moving here in 1982.

Anderson says she chose to approach the book as a biography, as a way of illuminating the cultural landscape Moje was a part of. By combining biographical details with social environment, cultural influences and art history, her book tells the story of a man, the background of an art movement and the history of a city.

Born in Germany in 1936 into a family of glassmakers, he worked as an apprentice to his father in a glass-grinding workshop, where he learnt to cut the material to be used as mirrors and windows.

"You can tell - the way he cut glass was perfection," Anderson says.

"And the way he would finish it was just brilliant, because that was how he learnt."

After this initial skills-based training, he would later set up his own glass studio in Hamburg, drawn to the idea of glass as a means of creative expression, rather than a medium for mass production.

"Klaus was one of the first to set up a glass studio, as an individual artist," Anderson says.

"In the [United] States, it was much more common at that stage, because they'd gone through the studio glass narrative tradition that happened there in the early 70s. So there was a studio-based practice in glass in the States, but it was more based on contemporary art aesthetic expression, less on refining your skills as a tool to then express your ideas, which is where Klaus was coming from."

But while Sellbach approached him as a proponent of the Bauhaus school of teaching, Moje's influences were more nuanced.

"With Klaus, a lot of people writing on his work, for example, might talk about the Bauhaus. Why does Bauhaus spring to mind? Because he was in Germany, it was post-Second World War, he knew some people who'd had connections with the Bauhaus," she says.

"But when you look at it, it was more the biography side of it, which was the Bauhaus influence when he worked with [artist] Lothar Schreyer, who was an ex-Bauhaus master."

Moje would eventually work on one of his first commissions, a set of church windows, with Schreyer.

"But it wasn't a Bauhaus aesthetic that influenced him, it was Lothar Schreyer's life and art. When he saw Lothar Schreyer, he said, 'he made me realise that art is possible as an everyday activity'.

"For him, Lothar Schreyer was an artist, and here was an artist sitting opposite him and art was a part of his everyday life."

This was a revelation for the young Moje, who, unlike many of his colleagues, had come from a trade, rather than a university background.

"For him, it was almost like permission to think as an artist, through meeting Lothar Shreyer - it wasn't Bauhaus aesthetic at all that was influencing him. So that's why I think it's a very interesting nexus between biography and influences. You just can't make assumptions one way or the other until you know some more details about the exact events."

In the late 1970s, Moje was invited to be a guest lecturer at the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington state, where he spoke about a technique he was developing of fusing glass, and his search for the right material to use. This would lead him to the Bullseye glass manufacturer in Portland, which was manufacturing glass panels for stained glass, and developing a fusing technique.

It would become a signature of Moje's work, and one he taught, alongside glass blowing, when he arrived in Canberra in 1982. It would also inform a new industry of kiln-formed glass as a medium, one that's now practiced throughout the glassmaking world.

His other signature was that of empowering other students' work. He didn't set assignments, but encouraged them to develop their own techniques and expression, while working alongside them.

In an obituary for Moje, current head of the Glass Workshop Richard Whitely recalled training with Moje in "a community that was self-determined and accountable".

"Klaus instilled within us the importance to be aware of the wider world and to see ourselves within that landscape, and that was far more valuable than any formal teaching structure," he wrote.

"He taught us that we needed to be masters of our methods rather than merely just masters of a material ... He worked under the belief that the skills and knowledge needed would form naturally, as they are needed, as we found our way. And he was right."

Moje taught at the ANU for 10 years before retiring to focus on his own work. He and his wife, Brigitte Enders-Moje, herself an established ceramicist, moved to Wapenda on the South Coast, where they set up a studio together.

He was also instrumental, during that time, in setting up the Canberra Glassworks in the former Kingston Powerhouse in 2007, following a concerted campaign for a workshop and gallery for the capital's emerging glass artists. It was a logical next step for the generation of his own students to find more opportunities to work and create in the city he was so committed to.

And, amidst all this, he was creating - works of stunning proficiency that invite the endless, marvelling gaze, and unlimited possibilities for interpretation. And that's how he always wanted it.

"Klaus would never say, 'This means that' - he would never make that connection," Anderson says.

"He'd say, 'Once I make it, I push it out into the world, and that's it. I go on to the next thing.' He would never, ever talk about meanings or interpretations, because he just didn't want to box things in.

"So the last thing that I would ever have done is want to explain the meaning of the work, and that's why I wanted to say, this is how this work happened. You make your own decisions..."

She says he was hesitant, at first, at the idea of working with her on a book about his life and work. But then, he realised it would be a useful exercise.

A natural archivist, it was a way of documenting his own work to discern patterns, and record his own trajectory. Many of the works he photographed himself; some images are the only in existence, as the church windows in Germany are no longer together.

Posterity didn't come into it; it was a useful project to undertake, and now was as good a time as any. He was able to see some finished chapters before he died in Canberra in 2016, at the age of 79.

And the result is a visual feast - page after page of arresting images, of bowls and panels captured from above, as glowing, buzzing, ever-changing forms that speak to a life of drive, innovation and beauty - for the sake of it, as much as anything else.