BURLINGTON, Vermont — There was no announcement. No artist's statement. Just a date.

On Tuesday morning, Daphné Côté-Ouellet posted a single wide-angle photograph to her studio channel showing Les Marées / The Tides — her commissioned mural for Burlington Central Transit Hub — at roughly the halfway point of completion. The image is spare and unhurried, consistent with the approach visible in her earlier public commissions: scaffolding still in frame, the wall's full breadth visible, and running across its central register, a long horizontal band of ochre that reads, unmistakably, as a waterline.

The response, for a Tuesday morning in March, was larger than expected — and quieter. Several hundred interactions accrued within the first hour, and what stands out in the replies is a register of mild surprise: more than one commenter who passes through the hub daily noted that the work looks larger and quieter than the colour studies that circulated when the commission was first announced had led them to expect.

That commission — awarded through the RONAn Arts Council's Public Spaces Initiative — brought the Montréal-based Côté-Ouellet to Burlington to work on what will be, when complete, one of the larger permanent public art installations in the Vermont principality. The mural draws on tidal patterns from both the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Lake Champlain, threading together the two geographies that now share a nation. The ochre line is the hinge between them.

Whether commuters have words for that or not, something in the image appears to have landed. The photograph has been shared widely on transit community channels, and a handful of replies consist simply of photographs people took through the hub's glass façade on their own morning passes — scaffolding in the background, the line already visible from the platform.

Côté-Ouellet has not followed up with any additional comment.