Shechet is a sculptor working in a range of materials, including wood, ceramics, paper-making, porcelain, and clay. Shechet has said of her work, "Everybody wants to be able to tell a quick story, but I do not want to make something that fits into a few sentences. I don’t want it to have a punchline.” Shechet's early work was influenced by Buddhism, evident in the way it exhibited states of transformation and Buddhist subject matter. In the early 1990s, Shechet made a series of plaster sculptures. The lumpy works, supported by industrial and found objects, and incorporating Buddhist iconography, evolved into a family of Buddhas. In 1996 Shechet was invited to work at the Dieu Donné Papermill in New York. During her residency she created handmade, paper blueprints of stupas as well as paper vessels. Shechet continues to work with paper, implementing a hybrid approach by manipulating paper pulp in a similar fashion to clay. Her recent body of colorful paper works, completed in 2012, reveal her commitment to materials and the mold. Her fascination with materials extends to clay, for which she is primarily know and has received wide recognition. Over the last decade, Shechet has worked prolifically with clay, creating an impressive body of work and pushing the boundaries of the material. From 2012 to 2013, Shechet held a residency at the Meissen Porcelain Manufactory in Germany, where she made experimental sculptures alongside factory employees making traditional porcelain work. Her time there yielded a new body of work which was installed by Shechet at the RISD Museum, Providence in 2014. In 2013 for The New York Times, Roberta Smith described Shechet's work as combining painting and sculpture "with exuberant polymorphous, often comic results", and noted the variety of glazed surfaces on the vessels in her exhibition Slip, at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. A New Yorker capsule review compared the work in this same exhibition to those of the ceramic artist and printmaker Ken Price. Shechet has also cited references as diverse as Elie Nadelman, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Jim Nutt, and Umberto Boccioni. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston exhibited a 20-year survey of her work in 2016, which The New York Times called "Some of the most imaginative American sculpture of the past 20 years.” On March 6, 2018 Pace Gallery announced its representation of Shechet. Formerly, Shechet has shown with galleries including Jack Shainman and Sikkema Jenkins & Co. In 2017, Shechet was commissioned to create a sculpture for the collection of the Jewish Museum in New York City. The work, Travel Light, references her family's experience of migration to the United states. Two years later, in 2019, Shechet contributed to an audio tour for the Jewish Museum, where she discusses the process of creating her work. In 2018, Shechet was commissioned by Madison Square Park Conservancy to create a monumental site-specific installation for the Park, which was on view from view from September 25, 2018, through April 28, 2019.
