Ray’s work is deeply invested in exploring at multiple registers the intertwined relationship between time and sculpture. Gestating for several years, Two Horses underwent a slow, painstaking process of drafting, testing and creating the image in different scales, and in a range of materials, with the artist eventually choosing a single specific block of black Virginia granite. Granite is an igneous rock formed by the slow cooling of molten magma, in the process creating interlocking crystals of feldspar, quartz, and mica which are apparent to the eye.　

For Ray, this intrinsic quality of granite—a geological manifestation of the coursing of time through matter—lends it ideally to the production of a sculpture that meditates on this very theme. The Latin granum or grain that gives the stone its name offers vivid evidence of this evolutionary process of deep-earth disruption and its petrification. The rock’s inherent horizontal striations, which when worked through the sculptural articulation allow the material to feature as part of the composition, create a visually active surface, pulsating with incipience.