Passers-by were stunned by the sight of Karin Paish walking around a Shoreham supermarket in nothing but a bikini.

The chilly weather did nothing to deter the artist as she wandered around the town in the skimpy two-piece made from fresh flowers.

Karin said she was hoping to get people thinking about the colour pink as part of an exhibition called Pinkorama.

She said: "A lot of people think the colour pink has associations which cramp its style.

"It is seen as girly and wimpish so a lot of people said they thought pink was a colour that needed redefining."

As part of this redefinition, Karin, 27, swathed her Shoreham houseboat in 90 metres of pink muslin.

She gave its walls a rosy tinge and enlisted four other artists to explore their impressions of the colour.

Hull-based Harry Palmer emailed a pink star to hundreds of his friends, asking them to scan it into their computer, print it off and send it to him.

His display of all the stars revealed the vast differences in the computer-printed pink, from scarlet to candy-pale.

Charlotte Walshe performed a dance on the jetty of the houseboat, known as the Alchemic Resource Centre, covered from head to toe in pink body paint.

Other displays included a photo-montage of pink flesh and flowers by Alison Milner and an exploration of the kitsch qualities of pink by Dan Thompson, which included a pink-striped Bagpuss, a pink panther and a plastic pink chandelier.

Karin was hoping to draw attention to the differences between natural and unnatural pinks during her stroll through Shoreham.

She pinned a pink flower symbol to anything she saw which was natural, such as meat in the supermarket and people's skin, and a pink test tube to unnatural pinks, from a buoy in the harbour to a plastic toy in a toy shop.

She said: "A lot of people said the exhibition had made them re-evaluate the colour pink and think more about colours generally.

"People said they left the boat feeling really buoyant and full of energy."

The exhibition was the latest in a series of performance art explorations Karin has undertaken.

She spent six months in silence from February last year as a way of examining how we communicate with each other.

Karin did not breathe a word for the whole six-month period except for once, when she accidentally said "hello" to her pet cat.