Nieu-Bethesda is far away from most places. It was the last village in South Africa to get electricity, in 1991, and it still doesn’t have a gas station or an A.T.M. Ringed by mountains, it feels like the sort of place where compasses would stop working, where Victorian-era explorers would lay down their pith helmets and die for no good reason. When I first arrived there, after a long drive through the Karoo desert, I was spooked by the village’s close, hallucinatory green. I had always thought of willows as resolutely midsize trees, but the ones lining the dirt road into Nieu-Bethesda were monumental. They took up whole gardens, draped themselves over roofs and ornamental ponds. When the wind blew through them, it sounded like fire. My sense of the village changed with the light: it was a haven, a prison, a haven again. The horses shied at things I couldn’t see, and every afternoon the dogs started barking all at once, at nothing.

The last time that Nieu-Bethesda could reasonably be described as thriving was about a hundred years ago. There is no real reason to go there, except to see the Owl House, which was built by the reclusive artist Helen Martins and maintained as a museum after her death. As Martins’s relative fame has grown over the years, traffic to the village has steadily increased. Tourists like me come for the weekend, visit the Owl House, sigh at the mountains and the silence, and leave with glass-eyed owl statuettes, or perhaps little owl refrigerator magnets. Martins’s work and life have become the subject of books, films, dissertations, plays, and cheery tourist brochures that determinedly downplay the more distressing elements of her biography.

Martins was born in 1897, at a time when Nieu-Bethesda was still the busy center of a farming community. She was the last of ten children. Her Afrikaans-speaking parents named her after a sister who had died, but they called her Joodjie (“little Jew”) because of her dark hair. Very clever and very pretty, she trained as a teacher and married a man from the village, another teacher. They left. Her husband formed a theatre company, and they travelled around the country putting on amateur productions. The marriage was not good; the dramatist was unfaithful, and there are rumors that he coerced Martins into having two abortions during their six years together, a detail often used to explain all the babies that feature in her work. The couple divorced in 1926. Five years later, when Martins was thirty, she came back to the house she was born in to look after her parents.

Martins loved her mother, and was devastated by her death, from breast cancer, in 1941. Her relationship with her father was, as they say, troubled. Much of what is known about Martins is clouded by speculation, a function of her isolation, her habit of burning letters, and her own self-mythologizing. The cloud is heaviest over this part of her life. When I visited the Owl house, three people informed me, unprompted, that there was no truth whatsoever to the rumor that Martins was a victim of incest; nevertheless, the story persists. The father, Piet Martins, was by all accounts a vindictive and bitter man. He had a big black Bible in which he wrote the names of his enemies next to particularly vengeful verses. After Martins’s mother died, when her father was sick and getting sicker, from stomach cancer, she banished him to an outside room, painted the walls black, put a bed in one corner and a crouching black stove in the other, and scratched “The Lion’s Den” into the concrete stairs leading up to the door. I was told that she and her father never exchanged another word in the four years it took him to die.

Karoo houses do not, in general, admit a lot of light. They are built to be cool in summer and warm in winter, with deep verandas and strategically placed windows. The floors often feel cold underfoot, and at night the darkness is total. Martins spent fourteen years in a house like that, with the sun setting in front of her every day. To light all the rooms properly would have required hundreds of candles and paraffin lamps. In any case, she had something more ambitious in mind. She was not rich, but she was still a white woman in apartheid-era South Africa, which meant that she could depend on the ready availability of black labor. With the paid help of a succession of workers from the neighboring sheep farms, she started removing sections of the walls in her house and replacing them with panes of colored cathedral glass. Martins seems to have needed light like she needed air, and, with a great deal of effort by her and her collaborators, she got it. The word “effort” is important here: Martins never referred to herself as an artist, or to her house as art. She had no formal training, and neither did any of the men who assisted her. She called what they did work, and they did it for forty years.

Photograph by Jarred Figgins Photograph by Jarred Figgins

It must have felt like a miracle to wring light out of a house like that, to make the rooms glow luminescent green and red, the light bouncing first off mirrors, then off the crushed glass that Martins stuck to the walls and ceilings. She ground it up in a coffee grinder, all that glass, and stored it in jars, one for each color. There are stories of Martins standing with her first assistant, Jonas Adams, throwing glass up at the freshly painted ceiling and laughing as it fell around her. Adams said that he closed his eyes, because he was scared for them, but that she kept hers open. There is dust on the glass walls now, and some of Martins’s mosaics have worn away, but the over-all effect is still astonishing. Like the light in the Donald Justice poem, it comes from everywhere and nowhere at once. You feel how happy it must have made her.

Photograph by Jarred Figgins

But the Owl House can turn vicious with a suddenness that feels like missing a step in the dark. It is full of arrestingly scary objects, things that are hard to imagine living with. In the Powder Room, there is a sculpture that Martins called the Little Devil, a vaguely person-shaped sack with two legs protruding from it. One has a shoed human foot at the end of it, the other a hoof. There are tables that have coiled snakes for bases. There is a tea cozy in the kitchen with a monkeyish-humanish head on top, and probably whoever gave it to Martins thought it was cute, but it sits there like something out of hell. In another room, there is a twin bed with two dolls lying in it face up, staring at the ceiling; Martins referred to it as the Honeymoon Room.

The house, which came into being as a symptom of Martins’s loneliness and darkness, became the cause of those things as well. The white, conservative Christians in town thought that she was a witch, and whispered about her when she stepped out into the street. So she went out less. After she and her assistants finished the house, they started on a sculpture garden, known as the Camel Yard. Martins’s closest collaborator during this time was Koos Malgas, a “colored” former sheep shearer. Martins would draw an idea she had, they would talk it over together, and then Malgas would construct the wire frame over which the concrete was slowly layered.

Much of the Camel Yard has a joyful, processional feel. It is crowded with concrete statues—of birds, camels, prophets, giraffes, donkeys, mermaids, babies, men who look like animals, women who look like angels—all of them with hands raised, facing the direction that Martins thought was east, toward Mecca. Martins grew Queen of the Night cacti all over the garden, and for a few weeks every year they explode with creamy-white flowers and light up the night. A wire-worked sign overhead reads, “This Is My World.” Like the house, though, the garden has a nasty edge. The peacocks’ tails are decorated with brutal shards of glass. The statue representing Martins has its little toes missing. In the Garden of Debauchery, there is a man with a rooster’s head in the process of unbuttoning his pants, a joke lacking any trace of humor.

Photograph by Jarred Figgins

A woman who was closely involved with the preservation of the Owl House and who knew Martins’s story well told me that “she killed herself because she was depressed, not because she couldn’t see. People don’t kill themselves because of their eyes.” But depression and darkness, physical darkness, seem to have been the same thing for Martins. After all those years of crushing up glass and throwing it into the air, she started to go blind. In a letter to a close friend just before she died, she wrote, “I cannot keep my eyes open, not for anything—should the doctor advise that I should leave off working, then I shall die; and directly.” She killed herself in the winter of 1976, at the time of year when the light is darkest, hitting the mountains at the meanest angle. Her method of suicide was to swallow caustic soda, the final bit of cruelty she directed toward herself. Among the instructions she left was a letter to the police informing them that she had given Malgas her radio, because she knew that they would assume he had stolen it. She took three days to die.

Photograph by Jarred Figgins

In Hebrew and Aramaic, the word “Bethesda” translates as “house of grace” or “house of mercy.” It can also mean “shame” or “disgrace.” In the Gospel of John, the pool of Bethesda is where sick people go to be healed. The aptness of her village’s name couldn’t have escaped Martins. You need to be sick before you are healed; grace means something only if you know about disgrace; there is no light without the dark. That she couldn’t or wouldn’t leave the tiny village that often made her so unhappy is the reason that the Owl House exists. How you see it can change with the light. By the time I left Nieu-Bethesda, the willow trees seemed to me to be of completely normal size, and I was sure all the dogs were barking at something.