[7][8][9] New York Times critic Holland Cotter wrote that her career "has encompassed both more or less traditional ceramic pots and wildly experimental abstract forms: amoebalike, intestinal, spiky, sexual, historically referential and often displayed on fantastically inventive pedestals … this is some of the most imaginative American sculpture of the past 20 years.

[33][34][8] In a 2007 review, New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote that these works were "full of references yet almost debt-free ... mov[ing] effortlessly between art and religion and East and West, and from painting and sculpture to craft and ritual.

[16][8][24] Sebastian Smee of The Boston Globe wrote, "It's in the harmonies and tensions between these colors and textures, between suggestions of both order and anarchy, decay and blooming freshness, that these works cough, splutter, and sing … Shechet knows that this life is at once fugitive and monumental, characterized by strange, dreamlike changes of pace, unreasonable, asymmetrical, and ultimately unknowable.

"[16] Of note is the contrast between Shechet's open-ended, intuitive method, which embraces improvisation, accidents and rule-breaking, and the technical skill and rigor that underlies it, which encompasses fabrication, carving and clay-firing experiments with innovated glaze.

[5][37][38][39] In the solo exhibitions "The Sound of It" (Jack Shainman Gallery, 2010) and "Slip" (Sikkema Jenkins & Co., 2013), Shechet presented ungainly biomorphic ceramic forms on bases made of cast concrete, kiln bricks and painted hardwood, among other materials.

[40][8] In a similar upending of formal-versus-functional boundaries, the first show included clusters of bowls, jugs and vitrines—none of practical usefulness—and inversions of the clay firing process in which the free forms were left in their original, unglazed state and the kiln-brick bases given detailed colorful attention.

[40] Humor also arises out of her improvised biomorphic forms, which writers have described as rough-hewn, simultaneously awkward and self-supporting, and comical in their harboring of unexpected apertures, bizarre appendages, protrusions and outcroppings, and displaced limbs and growths.

[3][6][40] The sculpture No Noise (2013) epitomizes these qualities, suggesting a large-pored, coral biomorph with a nose-like bump that seems upended, as though it had slipped on a banana peel; Roberta Smith likened it to a "flailing hot-water bottle.

[54] Farragut's statue is seen by some as a symbol of the male domination historically prevalent in both art and society, and somewhat controversially, Shechet negotiated with park officials to empty the pool of water in front of the sculpture, effectively disempowering it.

[57][44] A Brooklyn Rail review likened its synthesis of painting and sculpture in terms of color, surface and form to painters Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso; the materials included storm-felled tree trunks with knots filled in with brass, hunks of glazed ceramic, cast iron and steel (e.g., The Crown Jewel, 2020).

[9][58] At Frieze Masters (2023, London), Shechet exhibited eleven brilliantly colored and richly textured sculptures and cast paper vessels alongside a medieval illuminated manuscript that served as inspiration.

[63][65][1][64] New York Times critic Nancy Hass wrote that the show's works "share a language—swooping curves, unexpected apertures and slits, right angles, tunnels, cones, shieldlike expanses—but each has its own personality, creating a sort of universe of mythical creatures.