On a gray morning in February, the artist Arlene Shechet was in her Kingston, N.Y., studio, standing over her sculpture “Deep Dive” (2020). The squat, abstract piece, waist-high and hefty as a boulder, features two interlocking, acid-green ceramic forms that undulate like the hills of a lush volcanic island, perched on a curved steel-and-wood foot. It is one of 18 works that will appear in her show “Skirts,” which opens today at Pace Gallery in New York. Shechet carved the wood — a sturdy piece of walnut, stripped of bark and cut into a smooth half-cylinder — five years ago, and then left it in her yard. She rediscovered the log, which she described as “homely and gorgeous,” only recently, drying it in her wood kiln to rid it of bugs. On top of the wood, now encased in metal cladding that the artist referred to as its “steel suit,” the ceramic pieces form an awkward embrace. Though solid and fixed by an invisible, internal armature, the sculpture seemed not just ready to topple but caught in the act of toppling.

Motion, or the suggestion thereof, is central to Shechet’s work. In her sculptures, elements — some found, others formed by the artist’s hand — huddle together or appear to hover in space. Coils of clay seem to lurch and bulge, and ceramic glazes crawl and bubble as though still in the kiln. High-gloss paint, in saturated brights and deep jewel tones, glistens as if wet. She pines, she has said, for the aliveness of wet clay or paint — the thing still in process. “I want the work to look like it’s slipping and sliding and has life,” Shechet told me, articulating her career-long fascination with the natural entropy of her materials and capturing the energy of her process. “I don’t make drawings. I don’t figure it out before. I grab these things and put one next to the other,” she said. “That’s why my studio is crammed with stuff.”