Room Service by Maria Farrar

I hadn’t been abroad in a while and it was bitterly cold in London so I tried to imagine what it
was like to be somewhere hot. I tried to remember the feeling of sun on my skin, and what an
Eastern sunset on a summer’s evening looked and felt like. I wanted to feel the excitement of
travel when I couldn’t; its textures and colours. During this imaginary expedition I became
interested in the idea of the hotel room. What an odd place it is. Hotel rooms are all the same
regardless of the country they’re in. The temperature is kept at an optimum 22 degrees. They
don’t have anything culturally unique about them, and if they do, it’s at a diluted and superficial
level. The reality of the country goes on outside.

In Manilla, for instance, you emerge from a hotel room into the murky air of motorbike gasoline,
colourful cotton dresses blowing about and old polluting jeepneys. The smells of rotting meat,
drains not drained properly and ripe tropical fruit all mix together. On a cold winter's day in
England, when the cold wrenches at your fingers and tones, trees are barren, and decay is
everywhere, the hotel room provides comfort of a different sort.

In the muted calm of a hotel, the comfort is created through the performances of employees
whose life I know nothing about. Room service, cleaning, ironing your dresses. There’s an
anti-interaction, where contact is minimal, or made only with debris and damp towels. It’s a
human to human relationship that pretends not to have taken place, yet is so present. The
tautness of the bed sheets.The hair that was caught in the drain that has now gone.

My mother was a chambermaid once in Japan, and when she first came to England. She
proudly wore the uniform which was always freshly pressed and told funny stories about the
awful stuff she had to clean up instead of complaining about it. For a small woman to lift and
change sheets of king size mattresses must have been a struggle but I never heard her
complain. She reminded herself and me of her self-worth by putting up her framed teacher’s
diploma from the Philippines in the most visible positions of every home we moved to. Despite
this, she took pride in her job as a chambermaid. When I painted my chambermaids in crisp
uniforms, starched ribbons and polished shoes, I thought of her pride. The women in my
paintings are just as glamorous as the guests that they serve. I wanted to show them at their
work with all the dignity that they deserve.