BURLINGTON — By early afternoon Sunday, the exterior wall of Burlington's Central Transit Hub had been cleaned, primed, and left to settle. Daphné Côté-Ouellet was there to watch it do so.

The Montréal-based artist, commissioned to create Les Marées / The Tides as part of RONA's sixth-anniversary public art initiative, spent several hours on site as hub operations staff completed the first sections of surface preparation. Her task in the afternoon light was a precise one: assessing how the newly primed wall absorbed and reflected sunlight at the angles she had documented during an earlier site survey.

It is quiet work, and she described it as such. In a brief post to her studio channel, Côté-Ouellet wrote that the primed surface was "quieter than I expected, which is where it should start."

The comment speaks to the craft. Surface preparation is foundational — the texture and porosity of a primed wall shape everything that comes after. Artists working at this scale spend as much time considering what the wall will accept as what they plan to put on it.

Burlington Arts Council chair Miriam Osei-Bonsu confirmed the project remains on schedule. The mural is set to be unveiled in May, ahead of the sixth anniversary of the Philadelphia Declaration.

The transit hub wall — high-traffic, bilingual-signaged, and facing the late-afternoon southwestern light — was selected last year through a competitive process. Les Marées / The Tides will be among the larger works commissioned under the RONA@6 public art programme, which spans several principalities. Work on the mural itself is expected to begin in the coming weeks.