The Owl House
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 “Helen Martin's Owl House – Nieu Bethesda”, Adrienne Allderman |
The Owl House is a museum in Nieu-Bethesda, Eastern Cape, South Africa. The owner, Helen Martins, turned her house and the area around it into a visionary environment, elaborately decorated with ground glass and containing more than 300 statues including owls, camels, pyramids, peacocks, and people. She inherited the house from her parents and began its transformation after they died.
Helen Martins was a reclusive outsider artist who remains something of an enigma. Born on 23 December 1897 in Nieu-Bethesda, she was the youngest of six surviving children of Pieter Jakobus Martins and Hester Catharina Cornelia van der Merwe.
Helen was schooled in Graaf-Reinet and obtained a teaching diploma at the teachers college in Graaf-Reinet (now the police training college).
In 1919, Helen Martins moved to the Transvaal where she began teaching. On 7 January 1920, she married a colleague by the name of Willem Johannes Pienaar. The couple travelled around the country acting in theatre productions in the Transvaal, Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. Their marriage was not a happy one, and Helen left her husband on several occasions. She eventually divorced Pienaar in 1926.
Some time around 1927 or 1928, Helen returned to Nieu-Bethesda where she stayed for the next 31 years taking care of her elderly parents. Her mother Hester, with whom she reportedly had a close relationship, died of breast cancer in 1941. Her father has been various described as "eccentric and demanding" and possibly abusive. He lived in an outside room, with a stove and a bed to sleep on. After her father died of stomach cancer in 1945, Helen bricked up the windows, painted his room black, and put a sign reading "The Lion's Den".
Her parents left Helen the house. After their deaths Martins started to transform the house and the garden, spending years creating a visionary environment.
She is believed to have begun within the house, employing locals Jonas Adams and Piet van der Merwe to make structural alterations, and covering interior surfaces with ground glass. Windows, mirrors and lights further enhanced the illumination inside. Martins also used cement and wire, decorating the interior of her home and later building sculptures in her garden. In 1964, she was joined in her work by Koos Malgas, who helped her build the sculptures in the outside area called the Camel Yard. Theirs was an intensely collaborative process, meeting daily to envisioning and create new works.
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