Students take art, emotions to the wall

When Max Sloan, 17, arrived at Barker High School last year, he was sad and angry. He was overwhelmed by grief because several people he knew had died, including University High School students McKenzie Mott and Josie Freier, who were killed in a car accident. He wasn’t close friends with the two young women, but they shared many mutual friends.

“My friends were hurting so badly; it was really tough,” Sloan said.

He failed a couple of classes and reluctantly agreed to transfer to Barker, a smaller alternative high school. That’s where he met art teacher Jennifer Compau.

“He was just hurting so much,” Compau said. “The year leading up to him getting here had been like a war zone.”

Sloan said he always enjoyed painting and drawing so he felt at ease in the art room, but the pain was still there.

One day, Compau handed him a couple of balls of modeling clay and suggested he go outside and throw them at a bare wall on the playground.

“And I thought, how’s that going to help me feel better?” Sloan said.

But he plodded outside and took aim at old blue wall.

Then he threw the first clay ball as hard as he could and watched it stick to the cinderblock with a satisfying smack. Then he threw the second.

“I broke a sweat, that’s how many balls I threw at that wall that day,” Sloan said with a grin. “It helped me vent. I’m not big on sharing my feelings.”

When he came back inside, Compau said he looked like someone who finally exhaled after holding his breath for way too long.

Soon, other students joined Sloan at the clay wall, as they call it.

They threw so many clay balls the blue paint began to chip and peel off the cinderblocks.

“And Jennifer said to me, ‘That means you get to do a mural out there,’ ” Sloan said.

He sketched out an elephant, which he said is an animal that’s “fierce and doesn’t forget” and began working on transferring the graffiti-style drawing to the wall using spray paint.

The entire process made Sloan feel better.

Students would share personal stories with him, sometimes while throwing clay balls at the wall, and Sloan listened carefully to what they had to say.

“Sometimes it’s easier for them to share their feelings with someone their own age,” he said. “Or they can just throw clay at the wall and not say anything.”

Compau said she believes the clay wall helps the students feel better because it gets them unstuck from overwhelming feelings.

“They learn that you can go from one frame of mind to the other,” Compau said. “They don’t have to be stuck in that emotional cave.”

Sloan said the wall provides an emotional release without substance abuse which, he said, is a big problem among young people who use drugs to hide how they feel.

Compau and Sloan joke that clay walls would be useful structures at parks and other schools, to help both young and old deal with frustrations.

“Hitting that wall is like a big exhale,” Sloan said. “It changes your frame of mind.”