This is My World: the Life of Helen Martins, Creator of the Owl House

By Susan Imrie Ross

Set in the dusty confines of small-town South Africa, this vivid yet scholarly biography of Helen Martins tells the story of an extraordinary artist's struggle to transform her world. Susan Ross  uncovers previously unknown information about Helen Martin's life in unpublished and rigorously researched material which she uses to explain what it was that drove Helen Martins to live a life both startling in its hopefulness and tragic in its loneliness. In doing so she restores weight and dignity to this frequently misunderstood woman.

The interviews, letters and photographs that describe Helen Martin's search for personal identity also document the metamorphosis of an ordinary Karoo house into the Owl House - one of South Africa's foremost examples of Outsider art. Hailed as definitive by the doctoral examiners who first read the text, the biography places Helen Martin's work in the context of other outsider artists world-wide. This is My World also serves as a lavishly illustrated and detailed record of a frail art whose long term survival is uncertain..

 Hard Cover with Dust Jacket in good condition,

First Edition 1977