The artist’s idea
Fort Mason’s rail history
Matthew Passmore designed Tide/Untied to recall Fort Mason’s railroad tracks and its place on San Francisco Bay.
Fort Mason was once an Army transport hub, with tracks connecting its warehouses and piers. The sculpture appears to continue those historic rails, lifting them into loops that suggest a nautical knot being tied or the movement of the tides.
Passmore describes it as an inhabitable sculpture: the low curves offer places to sit, and visitors can walk through the larger loops. It gives people a place to meet at the waterfront entrance.
Read Matthew Passmore / MoreLab’s full artist statement
Whimsical and embedded in the cultural and infrastructural history of Fort Mason, Tide/Untied is an inhabitable sculpture that helps define the entrance to Fort Mason Center (FMC), creates opportunities for wonder and curiosity, and offers a place for visitors to gather and meet.
Constructed of railroad track that seems to connect to the terminus of the historic track inside the Fort, the sculpture rail lifts dramatically out of the ground, creating places to sit, loops to walk through, and a playful definition to the entrance to the FMC.
Though abstract in form, Tide/Untied looks vaguely familiar; perhaps the form references a nautical knot, frozen somewhere in the process of being tied, or perhaps it is a gesture toward the rolling tides that have carved the contours of the San Francisco Bay for millennia. Whatever the form might spark in the imagination of the viewer, the material of the sculpture is deeply connected to the history of Fort Mason and the Waterfront.
One of the principal threads in MoreLab’s work is the relationship between people and urban infrastructure. As part of this exploration, we recently developed novel techniques and machinery for manipulating rail into seemingly impossible forms. Tide/Untied represents a further evolution, both conceptually and materially, for this line of inquiry.
Like Fort Mason, we too have been shaped by the simple power of rail.
Matthew Passmore / MoreLab · Tide/Untied