The Paradox of Kurinuki: Creating Through Subtraction

Aug 13, 2026

By Devika Sehgal

Discovering Kurinuki

Life is not always about adding. Sometimes, it is about removing until the essential can emerge.

I first became fascinated by Kurinuki during a visit to Japan. I had encountered the technique before, but seeing the work there made me want to understand it not just by looking, but by working with my own hands. Eventually, I took part in a workshop and spent time learning the process for myself.

Most pottery begins with an act of addition. You take a lump of clay and gradually build something from it. You add, shape, join, stretch and refine until a form begins to emerge.

Kurinuki begins somewhere else.

You start with a solid block of clay. Instead of building the vessel from the outside, you cut into the block, carve away material and eventually hollow it out from within.

You are not exactly building the vessel.

You are finding it.

That reversal fascinated me.

When Making Means Taking Away

The more I worked with Kurinuki, the more I realised that the idea of creating through subtraction is much older and much bigger than pottery.

It reminded me of the Ellora Caves in India, where an architectural space was not assembled piece by piece. Instead, the temple was carved directly out of the rock. The mountain was not used merely as raw material; it was transformed through the removal of everything that did not belong.

I also thought about the work of a sculptor carving a figure from a block of stone. The sculpture already exists as a possibility within the material. The artist's task is to reveal it by taking away what is unnecessary.

The mountain contains the temple.

The stone contains the sculpture.

The block of clay contains the vessel.

Perhaps that is why Kurinuki felt strangely familiar to me. It connected something I had discovered in Japan with something I had grown up seeing in India.

The Connection to Hindu Thought

There is also something about Kurinuki that reminds me of Hindu thought.

So much of our understanding of life involves looking beyond the obvious, removing what clouds our perception and moving closer to what is essential. Instead of constantly accumulating, there is value in recognising what can be released.

The idea of discovering rather than accumulating felt deeply familiar.

Kurinuki made this idea physical. Every cut becomes an act of decision. You remove something, and the form changes. You remove something else, and another possibility appears.

The process becomes less about forcing the clay into a predetermined shape and more about responding to what the material allows.

The Importance of Emptiness

And then there is the vessel itself.

When you hollow out a block of clay, you begin to understand that the space you create is just as important as the clay that remains.

A vessel needs its walls, but its purpose lies in the space within them.

While reading about Kurinuki, I came across a line attributed to Laozi:

“We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.”

I love this thought because it captures the paradox so simply.

The form creates the space, and the space gives the form its purpose.

Without the clay, there is no vessel. But without the emptiness within it, there is no vessel in the functional sense either.

Kurinuki makes that relationship especially visible because the interior space is created directly through removal.

Finding Balance Through Subtraction

Working with Kurinuki also makes you think constantly about balance.

Take away too little, and the piece can remain unnecessarily heavy. Take away too much, and you may compromise its strength or stability. Every cut has a consequence.

There is no shortcut.

You have to pay attention to the thickness of the walls, the relationship between the interior and exterior, the weight of the form and the way the clay responds as you work.

The process is physical, but it is also contemplative. You cannot remove material carelessly because every decision becomes part of the final object.

In that sense, Kurinuki teaches restraint.

It asks not only, What can I make?

But also, What can I leave out?

What Kurinuki Has Taught Me

Perhaps this is what has stayed with me most.

We spend so much of life adding.

More things. More responsibilities. More achievements. More ideas about who we should become.

We rarely stop to ask what can be taken away.

What is unnecessary?

What deserves space?

What is worth keeping?

I don't think Kurinuki has given me answers to those questions. But it has made me more conscious of asking them.

There is something powerful about working with a material in which every act of removal changes what remains. It reminds me that creation does not always require more.

Sometimes, it requires less.

Sometimes, what we are looking for is already there, hidden beneath everything we have accumulated.

And sometimes, like clay, we have to remove a little before we can see what was there all along.