FARMINGTON — Ten-foot pipes being painted island green by spatter-covered students on Wednesday were only a hint of what the public art project going up at the University of Maine at Farmington Art Gallery will look like when it is done Thursday.

Since Sunday, students under the direction of internationally known installation artist and sculptor Sallie McCorkle have been preparing and painting elements that will be incorporated into the construction using colors inspired by a Maine autumn — dried bouquet red, beehive brown, clown fish yellow and the verdant island green.

McCorkle’s works take the location of a piece into account when she plans and executes them, she said. The artwork in Farmington is a collaborative work being done with students here and with her students at Oklahoma State University, where she is a professor of art and is director of the Doel Reed Center for the Arts.

The UMF Gallery Fall Art Show opens at 5 p.m. Thursday; McCorkle will give a talk on her installation at 5:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. The gallery is at 246 Main St., behind the UMF Admissions Office.

McCorkle said she usually does outdoor installations and the challenge was to develop a work of art, having never been to the gallery or to Farmington before Sunday.

“I wanted to make something that was site-specific to this building, which used to be a barn,” she said Wednesday as students around her busily painted pipes.

“When you do this kind of art, you are never really sure until you’re totally done what it will look like,” she said.

“The interesting thing is that you go with what you have and do what you can with the amount of time you have,” she said.

After she was invited to UMF by longtime friend and Art Gallery Director Elizabeth Olbert, McCorkle researched the site and the region.

She said she learned about Farmington’s agricultural roots, which are similar to Oklahoma’s, and she realized the modern, open-space, renovated gallery was once a simple, three-story barn complete with a hay loft.

McCorkle decided the farming connection would be the basis of her design. But it was not until she walked through the doors of the gallery on Sunday that the details started to coalesce, she said.

One of the materials she is using in the construction is the building itself.

“The building is the art,” she said.

Another element that inspired her is the system of metal pipes used as structural and architectural members when the barn was converted to a gallery and are visible in some of the walls and along the stairway railings. Students have painted the visible pipes all island green and the display pedestals and seats using the same palette of colors.

The construction itself will use similar-diameter-sized pipes to “connect” the inside of the walls to the outside, using strong adhesive to support the network of piping to the vertical surfaces, she said.

The pipes will appear to be passing through the walls and windows and each will end at a bale of hay. There will be nine bales arranged on the ground outside the gallery and about a dozen of the gallery floors inside.

A 2-foot piece of pipe at each end will be striped with the same color paints and will have brief phrases written on them that were submitted by her art students in Oklahoma. Corresponding pipes inside the gallery will have phrases penned by the UMF students working with McCorkle on the installation.

Josh DeMello of Temple is a student-artist who volunteered to work on McCorkle’s installation.

“What I like about this is that Sallie is improvising an on-site installation and does not have a lot of time to work,” DeMello said Wednesday. “She picked up on key elements of the building and she is communicating to the public with the space.”

He also likes McCorkle’s concept of creating a connection between her students at Oklahoma State, whom she knows well, and students from UMF, whom she has known for only a few days.

DeMello said he likes the idea of community art.

“A community can become stronger when people gather together and get involved in creating something,” he said.

Among McCorkle’s better-known public art works are “The Barn-Raising,” at the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center in Pennsylvania; “Fences,” at the Empire Fulton Ferry State Park in Brooklyn, N.Y.; “Remembering September 11th: A Memorial Sculpture,” at Penn State University in University Park, Pennsylvania; and “Consuming Nature-Forest Art Path,” in Darmstadt, Germany.

Her work has also appeared in exhibits that include “Women Artists/Women Subjects” at Lincoln Center in New York and “Project Enduring LOOK” at the Chicago Art Institute.