Kate Dineen's kitchen is like a bazaar of cooking implements from around the world. There are pots and pans galore, complicated-looking cooking utensils, and exotic beaten metal dishes. Everything has a story, from the pressure cooker, bought in a market at Dubai, to the spun-copper cooking dishes like the ones Indian restaurants use to serve up balti, and the ancient, crude-looking rusty old grater, picked up in Jamaica. Even the jewel-coloured glass handles on the kitchen unit doors were bought back from travels in Bombay. You expect to see all sorts of wild and adventurous dishes being rustled up, with smells from every corner of the earth melting together in the pot: the kitchen of a truly well-travelled and creative cook. But while Kate is certainly well-travelled, she doesn't cook.
She admits to using the toaster, the juicer, and the kettle. But that's about the extent of it. Most of the food she eats is raw because she doesn't know what else to do with it. And to prove it, she points to the Baby Belling in the corner, with its two electric rings and mini oven space. Although she says a friend once cooked an entire Christmas dinner in it, it doesn't look as if it gets a lot of action. 'It's a total sham, the whole thing,' she says. 'I never cook.' The pots and urns and extraordinary cooking utensils are purely decorative. But then Kate Dineen is an artist. And the kitchen, in her ex-council flat in south London, is like a living installation.
Despite the fact that so little cooking goes on there, Kate's kitchen is a real comfort zone. It's sunny and bright and an endless source of conversation over tea and chocolate biscuits. She hasn't used her juicer for several months, because she has been preparing for an exhibition, but pulls out a bottle of Grenadine, which she says is much better than Ribena and reminds her of childhood holidays. 'I can't say anything interesting about extra virgin olive oil,' she admits, although she does have a bottle of lovely rich, unfiltered oil brought back from visiting her brother in Madrid. Near it on the shelf is a bizarre little liqueur bottle in the shape of a tree, a present from Canada, from her sister, the documentary maker, Molly Dineen.
'I like stuff that's been about a bit. And I like shiny, glistening new stuff too.' But when she buys her cookware, she's not interested in whether a pan has a heavy base, or whether a knife has a good grip. She simply goes for objects that she likes the look of - an interesting surface, or a bold shape. She is about as likely to use the pressure cooker from Dubai to make a stew, as she is to make a trip to Ikea. 'I love tools,' she says. 'And the pressure cooker is like a tool - I like the writing on it. Some words are etched into the lid in Arabic. It probably says "take care when opening".' This exploding bomb of a pot is the last thing on earth you would recommend for someone who doesn't cook. 'I think it might even involve a screwdriver to get the lid off,' she says. 'You'd end up with your eye out.' Her kitchen scissors, also from the market in Dubai, are the same. They'd probably work if they weren't so blunt and rusty. But they are, she says, objects of beauty.
The bare plaster walls of the kitchen are the same all the way through the flat. Kate prefers them unpainted, and has made a feature of them instead of covering them with flat paint. The units were made by a friend, using sheets of steel; the backs of the doors have been covered with sheets of copper; the shelves are slabs of marble from a friend who is a marble carver. The table is made from a chunk of marble too - its edges left rough and unfinished. 'It's all about surfaces,' she says. And when you see her art work, you realise how it's all tied up. She uses an ancient technique of fresco painting called Araash, which she learnt while living in Jaipur in India in the late Eighties. She has adapted it to make blocks of colour - lapis blue, burnt orange, shocking pink and blood red - which are built up layer by layer so that the colour goes all the way through the stone. The marble and alabaster plates on the kitchen table have the same quality but they are in daily use; Kate uses them to eat off. The beautiful translucent white marble cups and saucers, however, only come out on special occasions.
Kate's work and life is strongly influenced by her travels, particularly to India, which she has visited regularly since a teenager. She has friends in Bombay, and tries to go once a year. She looks forward to her trips not least because of the fresh fruit and vegetables. 'They have magenta pink carrots and blood red tomatoes there.' There's also a fruit she enjoys called a chicoo, which she describes as a cross between a date, a pear and a peach. And she loves the mangoes. She prefers the food from south India, to the richer fare of the north, but despite the fact she has all the equipment, doesn't attempt making any of her Indian favourites at home. 'I do eat at home, but easy things. If I have a friend here, I'll assemble stuff on a big tray - hummus, prawns, olives - lots of nice stuff to pick at. It has to be quite quick. I have things like squid that hardly involve any cooking. I do mussels quite a lot - just stick them in a pan on their own. They cook themselves. I like the ritual of it - that's why I like shellfish and stuff, things you have to work at and use your hands to eat.'
Although her culinary interests are more about collecting than cooking (not surprisingly, she doesn't have a single recipe book), she admits to being a bit of a snob about orange juice and will only drink it when freshly squeezed. She'll also occasionally make some real mint tea and drink it our of her Moroccan tea glasses which she bought from a mosque in Paris. And she has a thing about coffee. On a corner of one of the marble shelves, she has sacks of beans from Kenya and Cuba.
'There's some really nice Jamaican stuff but I'm saving it for a magic moment that probably won't happen.' She buys her coffee from the Algerian Coffee Stores in London's Soho, and usually has some ground figs as well to add to it. In her small food cupboard, a pot of Marmite has pride of place. 'It makes me feel secure,' she says. 'Pure comfort stuff.' The rest, she is happy to confess, is solely a feast for the eyes.
