Rae has a reputation as one of the most inventive and technically skilled young British painters. Her recent works combine an array of signs, symbols and gestural marks that are brushed, dripped, sprayed and drawn across the canvas. Her sources of inspiration are just as varied; sci-fi comics, cinema, music and advertising. She works on a computer to develop the graphic elements and has started to embellish her letter forms with coloured glitter. Behind this rich decorative surface dynamic forms float and converge in luminous, airless space. Concerning the use of computer graphics she said:

'I kind of figure out the composition and the scale of the letters - it really helps to have plan, because the paintings are very time-intensive. The gestural marks tend to be more improvisational, because it doesn't make sense to replicate gestures in Photoshop - they've got absolutely no relationship to what you get once it's eight foot tall.'

(Interview with Martin Herbert, Art Review, June 2001)