The Owl House: Was she mad or quite sane?

The small hamlet of Nieu Bethesda is sometimes called "the village left behind in time."  To some degree, that is the choice of its inhabitants.  For example, the villagers chose to keep their dirt streets, even though the government was willing to pave them.  So, you drive miles from Graaff-Reinet on pot-holed, rugged gravel roads to get to Nieu Bethesda.

Why go there at all?  Because it has also become known as a small artisan village - with an active women's art cooperative, several small breweries, and a quite famous landmark - The Owl House.  Jim went for the beer; I went for the art.  It worked out; we both liked both.

The Owl House is the home and birthplace of a woman named Helen Martins.  She was a small, Afrikaans woman who lived in the arid Karoo desert all her life.  She was in two short marriages.  She cared for her father until he died.  (Her father apparently was not an easy man with whom to live.)  After his death in the 1950s, she lived alone in her parent's very modest house.

She is reported to have said, "I am tired of living with all the gray in my life."  Today, her small house is a heritage site.  When you go in, you see EVERY inch of her house - walls, ceilings, doors, windows, window sills, door frames, etc. covered with ground colored glass.

Pantry of "glass jars"

Her kitchen pantry is still lined with canning jars, but when you look more closely, you realize that each contains ground glass, and the jars are sorted by the size and color of the glass inside.

Here's one of the bedrooms.  Each stripe is a new color of ground glass:

Using the most basic materials (she ground the glass from beer and other discarded bottles), she spent twenty-five years creating an interior filled with light and color.  I would LOVE to stay overnight in this house with just candles burning.  I can't even imagine how the colors would be reflected and amplified by the differently shaped mirrors she also hung.

These two are trying to hold back the hands of time

She then tackled her smallish yard.  At one point she is hung a sign on her gate that read, "This is my world."  She herself hated to be seen in public, but she created a yard full of people.  Virtually every inch is filled with cement statues.  Sometimes religious in theme, sometimes showing women as subservient to men, her statues are each compelling.  Here are a few:

A woman obviously "bending over backward"

Many statues face east

After viewing the Owl House, Jim and I went to Two Goats Deli and Brewery, a place Leon Goerdt would really love.  We sat outside on a picnic table in the shade, eating a lunch of great bread, goat cheese, and their homemade beer.   Sadly, Helen Martins committed suicide in 1976, but we sat and discussed her work, what she must have been thinking, what her life may have been like.

We learned later that Athol Fugard has written a quite famous play called The Road to Mecca about her.  We have never seen it.  Have you?