The Owl House

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 concrete sculptures including owls, camels, peacocks, pyramids, and people. She inherited the house from her parents and began its transformation after they died. Helen Martins 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.