NICKY BALACHANDRAN / A LIBRARY OF IDEAS
The Thought Behind the Work
Selections from longer-form moments of making—outtakes, fragments, contemplations, and pieces of thought that don’t always have a place in the finished work.
I’m interested in what happens when you look a little deeper into the psychology of a piece: not simply what it is, but what it is connected to. The ideas behind the ideas. The things I’m reading, noticing, remembering, questioning, and harmonizing with as I make.
I don’t really think of these thoughts as mine. They come from somewhere larger—a kind of collective intelligence, a living library of ideas that has been building for as long as people have been thinking, making, loving, observing, and trying to understand what it means to be here.
My writing, my paintings, my music, my films, my projects—they are all ways of processing that library. I give my particular voice to whatever I encounter that feels in harmony with it.
This is also why I’ve become less interested in the idea of a traditional brand. I’m interested in what comes after the brand: the energetic signature of a thing. What an experience feels like. What a piece of music leaves in you. What a place invites you to become. What a product actually is when you remove the packaging and the language around it.
These selections are a way into that space.
I’ll be sharing more and more of these thoughts as they emerge, alongside the work itself. I’m also in the process of publishing an art book that will live here—a deeper collection of the things I’ve been making, thinking about, and following.
Consider this an invitation to look around inside the things that light me up.
Mupasi
A ten-page devotional zine documenting the music, lineage, and ritual behind Mupasi.
10 PAGES / OPEN READER
Foreverborn
A seven-page visual edition for Foreverborn.
07 PAGES / OPEN READER
Create
A twenty-page visual edition.
20 PAGES / OPEN READER
Dream Collaboration
A seventeen-page visual collaboration.
17 PAGES / OPEN READER
Healing Music
A sixteen-page guide to healing music.
16 PAGES / OPEN READER
Magick Hour 333
A nine-page square visual edition.
09 PAGES / OPEN READER
Urgrossmutter
A twenty-five-page visual edition.
25 PAGES / OPEN READER
Style Yoga
A ten-page visual edition.
10 PAGES / OPEN READER
Read Between the Lines
A six-page landscape visual edition.
06 PAGES / OPEN READER
LIBRARY SHELF / 01
(Forbidden) Knowledge
Books, symbols, and beautiful fragments that continue to inform the work.
COVERS & OBJECTS / TO BE ADDED
01 / Consciousness, spirituality & inner practice
The Way of Tarot
Alejandro Jodorowsky & Marianne Costa
Psychomagic
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Be Here Now
Ram Dass
Inner Engineering
Sadhguru
The Varieties of Religious Experience
William James
The Perennial Philosophy
Aldous Huxley
Tao Te Ching
Lao Tsu
I Ching: The Book of Changes
02 / Sound, vibration & music
The Healing Power of Sound
Mitchell L. Gaynor
The Book of Sound Therapy
Nigel P. Short
The Master Switch
Tim Wu
Musicophilia
Oliver Sacks
This Is Your Brain on Music
Daniel J. Levitin
The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Brain
03 / Sacred sites, architecture & ancient knowledge
Sacred Places
Peter Nabokov & Robert Easton
The Power of Myth
Joseph Campbell
The Sacred and the Profane
Mircea Eliade
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Joseph Campbell
The Architecture of Happiness
Alain de Botton
The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life
Drunvalo Melchizedek
The Geometry of Creation
Robert Lawlor
The Golden Ratio
Mario Livio
A Pattern Language
Christopher Alexander
04 / Art, artists & the artist as thinker
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Monograph / catalogue raisonné
Ways of Seeing
John Berger
The Story of Art
E. H. Gombrich
Art and Visual Perception
Rudolf Arnheim
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Walter Benjamin
The Practice of Everyday Life
Michel de Certeau
The Artist’s Way
Julia Cameron
Interaction of Color
Josef Albers
Concerning the Spiritual in Art
Wassily Kandinsky
05 / Color, light & perception
Color and Light
James Gurney
The Secret Lives of Color
Kassia St. Clair
Chromophobia
David Batchelor
Color
Victoria Finlay
Opticks
Isaac Newton
The Nature of Light and Colour in the Open Air
M. E. Chevreul
06 / Tarot, symbolism & archetypes
Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom
Rachel Pollack
Meditations on the Tarot
Anonymous
The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination
Robert M. Place
Jung and Tarot
Sallie Nichols
Man and His Symbols
Carl Jung
ONE SOURCE / MANY PLACEMENTS
Each zine reader is still reusable: edit the shared reader once, and every placement across the site stays aligned.