Lush, semi-tropical vegetation growing rampant alongside a bayou called Petit Calliou in Chauvin, Louisiana, just 60 miles South South-West of New Orleans, was rapidly threatening a landscape of sculptures created by a local bricklayer and self-taught visionary artist, Kenny Hill. In a short time, the life-size cement figures would have disappeared beneath the undergrowth, like the temple sculptures surrounding Angkor Watt. But the discovery of the site by Dennis Siporski, then professor of Art at the nearby Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, led to the initiation of a rescue plan. Siporski contacted Terri Yoho, Executive Director of the Kohler Foundation in Wisconsin who organised the restoration and Nicholls University committed to a maintenance programme.(1) As a result, the Chauvin Sculpture Garden – which was constructed by Hill over a 13-year period and which represents the artist’s highly individual spiritual vision – lives on.

In its present state, the garden still retains some of the original rose bushes and banana trees planted by Hill. It is a lush and tranquil place, but carries an undercurrent of melancholy, a skein of tension created by the profusion of sculptured self-portraits of Hill, who appears throughout the site as a humble witness to the retinue of angels. One polychrome cement figure portrays him on horseback, another represents the bearded artist quizzically listening to a sea shell he holds to one ear, in others he is suffering or afflicted.

Sociologist Frédéric Allamel commented on the ennui evoked by Hill’s self-image. He compared him with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and the penitential characters in Marcel Proust’s novels.(2) As an ascetic type, Hill is joined by other forlorn figures, and a multitude of armed and heraldic sentinel angels and those of a more benign demeanour. The latter accompany their creator on his progress through the arched gateways and along the concrete paths that meander through the compact garden plot. Indeed, the garden possesses a revelatory quality; the angels guarding the gateways and the paths demonstrate that religious faith had a profound influence on Hill’s self-view and on the purposes of his art.

Born in 1950, Hill began to create this project in his late thirties. A close friend and neighbour, Keith Peters, notes that Hill worked on the sculpture in Chauvin for approximately thirteen years, during which time he was employed as a bricklayer, and often working outside the state.(3)

Hill’s consistent commitment to the project contributed to the garden’s stylistic and thematic unity. The message he created is sometimes humourous but always moving. His sincere, personal vision, his freedom and his creativity as an entirely self-taught artist allowed him to develop artwork that is unique and visionary. The artist emphasised the personal significance of his environment by inscribing the pathways with the phrases, ‘Enter into my heart,’ ‘It is Emty’ (sic), and ‘Heartofact’ (sic).

As a sanctuary, the site marks one man’s painful journey and his emergence as a creative artist. His quest is expressed in highly personalised spiritual terms. The lighthouse, visible from the Petit Calliou bayou, was ornamented with a painted cement relief sculpture as Hill developed the garden’s symbolism. As a monumental architectural form, the lighthouse resembles a Tower of Babel, and the reliefs represent diverse figurative types - many drawn from American history, such as cowboys, Native Americans, jazz musicians, and the U.S. Marines of Iwo Jima raising the flag atop Mt. Surabachi. They are juxtaposed with naked and clothed figures which are presided over by angels in judgment. One such figure is a self-portrait, held aloft by two angels wearing haloes constructed from a circle of fluorescent light bulbs.

In a self-portrait, Hill’s face is painted half black and half white, symbolically suggesting the artist’s personal struggle with issues of good-versus-evil. The special significance he gives to his internal strife at the moment he is caught and redeemed by angels, serves as a reference to the Last Judgment. He develops the theme in the freestanding sculptures and in the garden architecture.

The American imagery contained in the lighthouse tower culminates in stars and eagles positioned under its lower roof-line. These are more than just patriotic symbols: the stars refer to the United States and are also celestial; the eagle is the national emblem of the United States as well as an evangelical motif associated with St. John, who is commonly identified as the author of the fourth Gospel and of the Revelations. The stars and eagles thus reflect both Hill’s concept of his Louisiana garden as an expression of his patriotism and also his greater apocalyptic vision and spiritual message.

In other areas of the garden eagle imagery is repeated in the form of sculptures placed in the arched gateways and on columns, while five-pointed stars are replaced by orb-like celestial bodies which are employed as design motifs on the walkways and on the clothing of the angels and the artist himself.