but totally generative ‘third thing.’ Maybe an animistic plane of spirited forms evading us, escaping the gravitational pull of our poems and our metaphors. A place where objects, when they choose to visit us, do so with all their unknowable intelligence and perverse strangeness intact. Your question about ‘backstory’ - this invisible, unobservable reality existing around objects - could help access this ‘third thing.’ Generationally, we seem increasingly skilled at parsing tiny, even alchemical details that exist, or we believe to exist within objects…." Twelve Earths In 2017 McKean began work on a planetary sculpture titled Twelve Earths. The project, currently in development, launched as an extended collaboration with L.A. based group Fathomers—a creative research institute interested in producing long-term artworks. With the assistance of an interdisciplinary team of scientists, geographers, designers, technologists and more, the project will connect twelve invocatory sites around the earth along a perfect ring - a great circle. Over the next ten years, with the project scheduled to conclude in 2028, Twelve Earths will reveal a complex portrait of the earth. Speaking on behalf of McKean's project Stacy Switzer, director of Fathomers, discloses: “Twelve Earths is a project born of deep, abiding curiosity about the full range of possible experience on this planet. It insists that we think beyond ourselves and outside the myopia of the present to consider the past and future as tangible, affecting frames of reference." The Teignmouth Electron McKean is the owner of the Teignmouth Electron, an infamous 40 foot trimaran yacht helmed by the late Donald Crowhurst, who failed in his attempt to become the first person to circumnavigate the earth solo, without stopping. Crowhurst’s voyage, mental collapse and alleged suicide are well documented in the 1970 book "The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst" by Nicholas Tomalin. After years of researching the boat and its history, in 2007 McKean purchased the vessel, currently beached on Cayman Brac, as a means of fundamentally altering the relationship with the object. Speaking of the Teignmouth Electron, McKean states: "I think the Electron is quite easy to appreciate as an elegant metaphor about life, yearning, failure. But these concepts seem overly available. In this sense, it’s vital to not let our relationships with objects default into passive, ugly connoisseurship. That’s like tourism. As I’ve grown to understand it, the Electron resists; it will not be sculpture, it will not be an artwork. It