Bren Wilder: Face jugs and the humor of art

Bren Wilder sat in the corner of a coffee shop, his shaggy hair hanging over a small yellow sketchbook as he doodled along the graph lines. An old shoebox sat on the table next to him, filled with handmade pottery and stickers he’d drawn.

Wilder’s outfit reflected his “punk rock” DIY approach to art — rolled-up jeans, black Vans, and American traditional-style tattoos peeking out of the edges of his mossy green patchwork jacket.

“The second I touched clay, it just sucked me in and I was obsessed with the tactile nature of it,” he said, glancing around the shop through ombré shades and folding up his sketchbook. “I was very much into classical pottery for a while to hone techniques and learn the wheel. There’s something nice about functional work … but I found myself getting a little tired. Some of my peers would joke about potters (who) find themselves getting stuck in the kitchen.

“That’s where I found myself. That felt a bit limiting. I’ve started exploring the face jug format and a little bit more figurative sculptures, still mostly based on the potter’s wheel, but then altered and kind of adjusted from there.”

When visitors to West Union Art Studios look for Wilder’s name among the gallery pieces, they’ll find brown-and-blue jugs with contorted features, poked-out tongues, pursed lips, and seemingly groaning cyclopes.

“The faces, in terms of how they relate to current events, it’s more capturing emotions of anxiety about the current state of things,” he said. “Maybe there’s a little bit of a cathartic release in there on an abstract level. I wouldn’t say that I’m planning them out, necessarily, but the fact that so many come out looking like ‘Huh?’ is significant, to a degree.”

Despite his preference for functionality, his “most cherished format” is pen and ink drawings, which are cartoony and loose: metalhead frogs with tattoos and MP3 players, snails, toucans, and TVs impaled with swords comprise his framed pieces and stickers.

“Sometimes I’ll think of just dumb little things,” Wilder said. “Maybe they’re just funny to me. It’s like little inside jokes to jumpstart a making cycle.”

Inspired by the absurdist comics of Gary Larson — think “The Far Side” — Wilder mixes his humor with people-watching through his job at Fonta Flora Brewery.

One of the aspects he and his wife, Sarah, enjoyed the most about the area when they first moved here was how much nicer the people were than other places. Not to mention the clay traditions that came with them.

Wilder grew up in a small town close to Tacoma, Wash., and later majored in studio arts with an emphasis on ceramics at Pacific Lutheran University, where he met Sarah. Morganton offered the “grandeur” of the landscape without being “smack dab” in the middle of an expensive city like Asheville.

“Morganton’s kind of positioned in a way where you get that (small town experience), but it seems like there’s kind of an industrious spirit with a lot of the people that we’ve connected with and found a lot of support just to be ourselves and pursue our artwork and extend that towards other people that are living their best lives, too,” Wilder said.

More recently, Wilder has been working with local clay through Foothills Conservancy’s Oak Hill Wild Clay Program. Although some of those projects were tests, he hopes to have pieces pulled from the clay beneath the Oak Hill Community Park and fired by summer 2027.

“Art in general doesn’t have to be fine art, necessarily,” he said. “It can be whatever weird thing you want to do. Just put it out into the world and see what happens. I take that mentality with me from my drawing, and it’s helped remind me, even in clay, I can just make something and if it lands flat or doesn’t resonate, at least I made it. I enjoy it. It’s taken some of the pressure and the ego off of things.”