visionary environment helen martins and the owl house of nieu bethesda 02

8/14/2019 Visionary Environment Helen Martins and the Owl House of Nieu Bethesda 02

1/6

Visionary Environment Helen Martins and TheOwl House of Nieu Bethesda

By Tony McGregor

Thursday, August 14, 2008

On a cold winters' morning in1976, at the age of seventy-eight, Helen Martins took herown life by swallowing causticsoda. (From the biography ofHelen Martins on the official OwlHouse Foundation site

http://www.owlhouse.co.za/)So ended the tragic yetsomehow beautiful life of acolourful character whoseartistic vision and psychologicaldepth went mostly unnoticed byher neighbours in the dusty, out-of-the-way Great Karoo village ofNieu Bethesda.

Helen Martins, who went on tocreate the fantastical sculptures

and decorations of the OwlHouse, was born in 1897, theyoungest of six children born toOom (Uncle) Piet Martins andhis wife.

Nieu Bethesda is a small villagein the Great Karoo, founded bythe Rev. Andrew Murray, in avalley of the Sneeuberge (SnowMountains), in 1875. It lies in the

shadow of the Compassberg, which, at 2 540 metres, is the highest mountain in

the Eastern Cape.

My former wife Joan and I visited there in October 1999 and were entranced, asare so many others, by the Owl House. The spirit of Helen Martins is almostpalpable in the house and its fantastical garden.

Owl House Page 1
http://www.owlhouse.co.za/http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_gpRTBXx66bs/SKRa__3J8ZI/AAAAAAAAAE8/AL9wgXopNTU/s1600-h/Owl+Houe+01.jpghttp://www.owlhouse.co.za/http://www.owlhouse.co.za/http://www.owlhouse.co.za/


2/6

The small house isfull of colour and shimmer from the ground-glass wall covering and the largepanes of coloured glass in the windows. The interior was where Miss Helen, asshe was known, started the transformation of her modest home back in the late40s or early 50s. For this stage of the transformation of the house she used twolocal workmen to enlarge windows and help with the painting and installation ofthe ground glass wall coverings.

The garden is crowded with camels and owls and people of all kinds, many withskirts of coloured glass bottles, most of them facing East.

Owl House Page 2
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_gpRTBXx66bs/SKRa_g95EjI/AAAAAAAAAEs/22lHfWBAetQ/s1600-h/Owl+House+07.jpg


3/6

According to the official website of the

Owl House Museum the number of visitors to this fascinating place has reachedmore than 15 000 annually. This begs the question, Why? What is it that peoplelook for there? What draws them to this rather strange place in a very out-of-the-way corner of South Africa, far from the beaten track, far from any glitz or glitter?

The house itself is small and architecturally nondescript. And yet more than 1000people visit it each month on average. Though I must admit the day we werethere we were the only visitors, so Im not sure when these 1000 people visit.Maybe in holiday seasons. We visited in a very low season.

Owl House Page 3
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_gpRTBXx66bs/SKRa_5sPiNI/AAAAAAAAAE0/_plRD5fe2MU/s1600-h/Owl+House+04.jpg


4/6

Nieu Bethesda itself is a really beautifulplace, calm and peaceful to the point ofsomnolence. And like so many suchplaces full of stories and legends.

One of the most potent of these is the

story of Miss Helen and her Owl House.Is the house the beginning or the end ofher Road to Mecca? Is her garden ofwonders and delights a happy or a sadplace?

For the people of Nieu-Bethesda it wasin her lifetime a place of mystery andfear, a place which loudly disturbed theCalvinist calm and quiet of their townwith its Christian symbols facing theMuslim Mecca, with its brooding sexual

questioning. Even her relationship withthe workman Koos Malgas became anaffront to the burghers sensitivities inthe depth of apartheid South Africa.

Athol Fugards moving play The Roadto Mecca is about this confrontationbetween the repression of convention,symbolised by the character MariusBeyleveldt, and the defiance of the

visionary, embodied by Miss Helen.

It is tempting to see in Miss Helens outpouring of creations, her obsessive

covering of the walls of her house, evidence of sickness, of a diseased mind, asin what has become known as outsider art or , in Jean Dubuffets term, ArtBrut. This kind of art has become well known and widely studied and certainlythere are similarities with Miss Helens creations.

Dubuffet wrote about ArtBrut that it was createdwithout reference toworries of competition,acclaim and socialpromotion and waslargely self-taught. Miss

Helen certainly createdfrom what Dubuffetcalled solitude and frompure and authenticcreative impulses, butshe was at the sametime, perhapsparadoxically, concernedfor the preservation of

her creations, and was concerned to some extent about their acceptance byothers. She wanted, according to the Owl House Museum website, to berecognised as an artist.

Owl House Page 4
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_gpRTBXx66bs/SKRbAVGhArI/AAAAAAAAAFM/4rcMOO4JqZM/s1600-h/Nieuw+Bethesda+street.jpghttp://1.bp.blogspot.com/_gpRTBXx66bs/SKRbAPdWuWI/AAAAAAAAAFE/59UWuP9Q78Y/s1600-h/Owl+House+05.jpg


5/6

One of the most famous outsider artists is the Swiss asylum inmate Adolf Wofli,who also wanted to be recognised as an artist. His output of drawings shows hehad what is termed a horror vacui, a fear of empty spaces, and so his manydrawings are obsessively covered with no white spaces left. Was there a similarfear at work in Miss Helen? I would suspect so, though I would not imagine her to

be mad, as Wolfli undoubtedly was.What she undoubtedly was, was a sign of contradiction in an era and place ofconformity. Graeme Revell, who has studied the music that Wofli composed, haswritten that Wolflis music brings us to The realisation also that our aestheticsensibility is constrained by our limited perceptual ability. In other words, whatwe see (or hear) is limited by what we are able, as culturally determined, to see(or hear).

Which brings us back tothe question of whatpeople come to the OwlHouse wanting or

expecting to see? Is it amorbid fascination with orexpectations of seeingsymptoms of a sick mind?Is it the attraction of themerely picaresque? Or isthere some sense of coming into contact withsomething deeper. Somedeep connection with theorigins of human creativity,perhaps?

Dubuffet on outsider artagain: After a certainfamiliarity with theseflourishing of an exaltedfeverishness, lived so fullyand so intensely by theirauthors, we cannot avoidthe feeling that in relationto these works, cultural artin its entirety appears to bethe game of a futile

society, a fallaciousparade."

However I would notcharacterise the Owl Houseas outsider art but ratheras a visionaryenvironment as in the

following definition: Visionary environments ("fantasy worlds") areextensive/large-scale artistic installations (buildings, sculpture parks, etc)intended to capture intense subjective/personal experiences (dreams, fantasies,obsessions, etc) of their creators. The subjective/personal nature of these

projects often implies a marginal status for the artists involved, and there is astrong association between visionary environments and outsider art.

Owl House Page 5


6/6

(Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visionary_environments - accessed140808).

What l was left with at the end of our visit was a somewhat wistful feeling, afeeling that Miss Helen had been trying to communicate something very deep,very powerful to anyone who would visit her house, but somehow that something

was at once so fleeting and so obscure that to grasp it might destroy it, that inthe looking at it too deeply its meaning might be lost. The feeling was somethinglike what Wolfli wrote towards the end of his life: Some day again in the darkwind sweet childlike innocence will come.

Perhaps that is what the owl house provokes, a sense of childlike wonder andcuriosity, something will-o-the-wispish, playful yet sad, fleeting and profound,that evokes in people a nostalgia for what has never been and can never be. Aparadoxical coming together of darkness and innocence, symbolised by theethereal quality of the constructions in the Camel Yard, made of such earthly andcommonplace materials, yet pointing to something far other.

(All photographs above by Tony McGregor)

http://tonymcgregor-tonysplace.blogspot.com/

140808

Owl House Page 6
http://tonymcgregor-tonysplace.blogspot.com/http://tonymcgregor-tonysplace.blogspot.com/

visionary environment helen martins and the owl house of nieu bethesda 02

Documents