InterwovenThe scene makes the festival, the festival makes the scene

For thirty years, the Clarence Jazz Festival has grown alongside the music community that shaped it — an exchange of energy, people and place. This exhibition considers the Clarence Jazz Festival through practice and place — how creative work develops within a community, and how a festival becomes part of a cultural landscape over time.

Featuring historical visual art commissions, new work by the 2026 Commissioned Visual Festival Artist Janice Ross, archival photographs and media, rare audio recordings and a new series of interviews, the exhibition reflects on the reciprocal relationship between artists and the festival that has supported them for three decades. It foregrounds the voices of musicians who describe the festival as grassroots yet generative, intimately tied to the local scene while influential on a national scale.

By presenting these materials together, Interwoven invites visitors to consider how festivals endure, how they shape artistic identity, and how collective memory is built through shared creative experience.

View artworks by Tom Samek, Sally Glover, Alan Young, Sam Dobransky, Luisa Romeo, Shaleen Shajith, Leigh Rigozzi and Aleks Crossan.