BURLINGTON, Vt. — Daphné Côté-Ouellet spent Thursday morning walking the length of the Central Transit Hub's exterior wall with a measuring tape, a notebook, and the kind of focused patience that precedes large things.

The Montréal-based artist arrived to conduct a preliminary site survey for Les Marées / The Tides, the mural commissioned as part of RONA@6 — the Burlington Arts Council's contribution to the sixth anniversary of the Philadelphia Declaration, expected this coming May. She was accompanied by a documentation photographer from the council, whose images will be made available through the Arts Council's public portal in the coming days.

Côté-Ouellet met briefly with Burlington Arts Council chair Miriam Osei-Bonsu and Hub operations staff to discuss surface preparation and the particular challenges of the wall's orientation.

"The surface is more textured than the architectural drawings suggested," Osei-Bonsu said Thursday afternoon. "Daphné flagged that immediately — it's the kind of thing you only understand when you're standing in front of it. The afternoon light off the lake hits that wall in a way that could be genuinely extraordinary, or a real complication, depending on how the pigments are chosen. She spent a long time just watching it."

No confirmed installation date has been announced, though council staff indicated the project remains on schedule for its intended May unveiling. The precise timing, tied to Declaration anniversary programming across RONA, has not yet been made public.

For now, the wall remains unchanged: concrete and light under the grey-white of a Vermont winter that has not yet loosened its hold.