For Wiradjuri visual artist JAJA, The KNU is more than an exhibition thread or fellowship outcome. It is a living question, a creative proposition, and a call to imagine what comes after the structures of colonisation begin to fall away. As JAJA explains it, the project emerged from a deep decolonial practice and from an ancestral prompting to ask: if we are dismantling the colony, what are we creating in its place?

That question sits at the heart of JAJA’s fellowship project, The KNU — a body of work that holds both truth and possibility. It does not turn away from grief, violence, or dispossession. Instead, it insists on balance: alongside trauma and sorrow, there must also be making, imagining, and building. The KNU is about remembering to focus on what is being created moving forward.

The National Regional Arts Fellowship Program is a strategic project supported by the Australian Government Regional Arts Fund and delivered by Regional Arts Australia. Fellowships provide guaranteed income for regional artists and arts workers to develop work, skills, networks, or research. 

Over the course of the National Regional Arts Fellowship, that vision has expanded in powerful and unexpected ways. While early plans held possibilities across places and collaborations, the work has become grounded more strongly on Widjabul Country, where JAJA says everything opened up naturally. JAJA has established an art studio there and used the fellowship period to explore their practice across paint, textile, light and installation, following creative leads as they emerged and allowing the project to grow through relationship, experimentation and community connection.

The KNU now extends across painting, wearable art, fabric design, light projection, jewellery development and immersive exhibition-making. JAJA describes diving deeply into textiles in particular, learning the intensive processes of translating artwork onto fabric, testing materials, building patterns and developing garments. What began as an exploration has become a new creative pathway. The fellowship, JAJA says, has acted as an “activator”, creating the conditions to invest in experimentation that may not otherwise have been possible.

This spirit of expansion comes to life publicly in Higher Ground. Billed as “an evening of distinction and appreciation,” the event brings together community, culture, creativity and resilience on Widjabul Jagun. The program features Reasonable Doubt Society, with champagne and canapés curated by Wiradjuri owner-chef Dan Clynes; Country Immersion, an immersive live sound design by Mitch King (Widjabul Wia-bal/Yaegl); and The KNU, an art exposition by JAJA.

The event title, Higher Ground, carries additional meaning.

JAJA shared the importance of connection to Widjabul as a flood recovery town and about giving back through this collaborative exhibition. That context gives the project another layer: this is not only a showcase of creative development, but an offering to community, grounded in place, healing and collective uplift.

JAJA’s practice is deeply collaborative, and the fellowship has helped strengthen a growing network of First Nations and community-based creative relationships. Through the development of The KNU, JAJA has been working across fashion, sound, gallery spaces and artist collaborations, prioritising Blak-led partnerships where possible. The exhibition is an expression of this approach: rather than presenting art in isolation, Higher Ground invites audiences into an immersive experience of visual art, live sound, food and story. A moment of appreciation and the beginning of something KNU.

The KNU has arrived. Shop the THE KNU street threads now.