The Owl House Nieu Bethesda: a world Helen Martins created

​By Roxanne Reid
The dusty little village of Nieu Bethesda is 55km from Graaff-Reinet in the Eastern Cape Karoo. It's a detour off the N9 so not a place you ‘pass through’, but a destination. Most people who make the trip are lured here by The Owl House Nieu Bethesda, a world Helen Martins created. Using glass and cement she crafted something strange, sometimes disturbing, but always riveting.

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Miss Helen, as she was known locally, was the youngest of six children, became a teacher and married twice, both unsuccessfully. Already divorced once, she returned to Nieu Bethesda when she was about 30 to look after her ailing parents.

​Her mother died in 1941 and her father four years later. Now around 50 and tired of her drab life, Miss Helen started to change her environment, filling the house she’d inherited with light and colour, and creating hundreds of cement sculptures in the yard. Something of her relationship with her oppressive father can be intuited by the fact that she bricked up the windows of the room he’d lived in, painted it black and called it ‘the lion’s den’.

From the street, there's little hint of the strange world within

She became romantically involved with Johannes Hattingh, a married man, in the late 1930s, a relationship that lasted until his death in 1963. Although she married for the second time in 1952, it lasted only a few months.

Visit the Helen Martins museum around the corner from the Owl House to watch a short video about Martins and the Owl House. You’ll also be able to browse some photos and letters, her teaching certificate and piano certificates. It’s sad to see how pretty she was when she was young and how the ravages of a life of hardship and poverty showed in her face as she aged. Her unconventionality put her at odds with many of the locals and she became increasingly unwilling to participate in the world outside the one she created at the Owl House.

Self-portrait in the Camel Yard (note the missing little toe; Martins had hers removed with a bunion)

Suffering from arthritis and vision loss, she committed suicide by drinking caustic soda in 1976 at the age of 78 – a ghastly death that took three days. Her ashes were strewn in the Camel Yard.

She had written to a friend, ‘I see everything through a mist. The darkness is gathering around me – I am so depressed.’ Although it wasn’t diagnosed during her lifetime, it’s now thought that she was bipolar. Way back in 1952, she had written to Hattingh, ‘I am in hell, the days get heavier and darker.’

Her life was the inspiration for Athol Fugard’s play The Road to Mecca.

Kitchen ceiling at the Owl House, inspired by the lid of a tin of Sunbeam polish

​The interior of the Owl House
The Owl House opened as a museum in 1992. I’ve heard people say it’s dark and depressing, but I experience the interior as full of colour and light. Weird, yes; but not dismal.

The walls and ceilings are painted in bright colours and patterns, greens, yellows and reds, even pinks, all covered with crushed glass that she used to make in a coffee grinder in the yard and spray onto the paint while it was wet. It’s been said that glass grinding is what made her vision poor – the reason she wanted to fill the house with light and the reason she eventually killed herself – but she may have developed cataracts commonly associated with age as well.

Living room

Only the dining room walls are covered with wallpaper, with the ubiquitous ground glass glued on top. You can see evidence of her obsession with glass in the narrow pantry, which is stacked with preserving jars full of crushed glass of various colours.

Crushed glass lines the pantry shelves

There are many mirrors in the shapes of crescent moons, a sun with rays, a tree, a heart. Hattingh apparently had them made for her in Port Elizabeth.

There’s a collection of glass paraffin lamps in a cupboard in the sitting room, which is further livened up by a red window through which the sun shines in the morning. I imagine the house must be different in the afternoon, with different rooms coming to life. ​

Living room

In the long bedroom there are three beds next to each other. Miss Helen had a habit of using different beds so she could lie where the light was the best. Could she see the moon from here? Or was it better from there? 

Long bedroom

​There’s a very long bed in the green bedroom, made by putting a coffee table at the foot of the bed. This was where Hattingh – a very tall man – slept when he visited. Don’t trip over the odd piece of sculpture on the floor by the door. It has cement legs and feet, one human and the other a cloven hoof (a devil?), with an old leather bag as body and head. I don’t know what it – or the silver spoon lying next to it – means, but it’s one element of the interior that’s undeniably disturbing.

​The kitchen has a vast collection of old utensils and tins lining the shelves, as if they’re waiting for Miss Helen to come back in from her work in the Camel Yard. A large yellow sun with red background covers the ceiling, said to be inspired by the picture on the lid of a tin of Sunbeam polish. Off the kitchen is a long narrow bathroom, with a cement bath and mermaids.

Kitchen

The doorstep of the kitchen is covered in the bases of glass bottles of various colours. Outside, Miss Helen’s favourite owl stands guard. There’s also a fenced area where she used to keep live owls, and a tall glass-and-cement structure made entirely from amber-coloured bottles, with an owl on a shelf. The first time we visited in 2008, a curator told us that Miss Helen used to sit inside it when she was depressed. In the sunlight it’s beautiful, with a warm honey glow inside. (Sadly, on our most recent visit in 2018 we discovered that having someone in the house who can tell you about Martins and the house seems to be a thing of the past.)

Note the warm light inside this small refuge

The Camel Yard
Outside in the Camel Yard, Miss Helen’s ‘outsider art’ really comes to life, a baffling and intense brew of religious tableaus and mythical figures, some half-man, half-beast. Here the imagination seems more tortured. Inside it’s all bright lights and bright colours, but here the figures – inspired by the bible, and the poetry of Omar Khayam and William Blake – are distinctly darker, with strange creatures and tormented poses.

It’s slightly claustrophobic, with the sculptures stuffed into a space too small to hold them all. If you look more closely, though, there’s a weird order to some of the processions. 

​She worked for 13 years on the inside, then she and a progression of three helpers worked on the outside for 12 years before she died. The last of the helpers, Koos Malgas, later returned to help restore some of the sculptures when the Owl House was being readied to open as a museum.

The original entrance to the Camel Yard was a moon gate, where you would have been welcomed by ladies in crinoline dresses – cement torso and head, but bottles for their skirts – but as Miss Helen became more reclusive, she sealed off the entrance. 

​Don’t miss the corner of debauchery, with a strange bird-like man unbuttoning his trousers, a fat man plonked on a chair being served beer. There are also lines of poetry made of wire stuck to the fences. In the early morning light, they were easier to read from the shadows they cast than from the wire itself.

Lots of owls with glass eyes, lambs, mermaids, a camel with wings and an owl’s head, giraffe necks sprouting straight from the ground, nativity scenes, sphinxes and pyramids, the magi and the eastern star – these are some of her recurring themes. The place drips with symbolism, not all of which is easy to unravel. 

There are a couple of churches among the cement figures of the Camel Yard too, and it’s said that she used to go there to pray on a Sunday rather than in the village. 

​You may be mystified by some of what you see, even troubled, but there’s no denying Miss Helen’s creative impulse to carve out a new world, or her incredible drive to see it through.

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