Evan Woodruffe's recent work expands upon a variety of issues and interests that have formed the basis of earlier exhibitions. 2005’s Lost Blue Heaven, an exploration of internet based pornography and the complex issues that ensue, surround notions of beauty, desire, and the abject. This exploration inherently looked at the ambiguous relationship that exists between the self and other. In the 2008 exhibition Scene, Woodruffe extended these notions of beauty, desire, and temptation into an unfolding narrative that takes the form of a road trip within the familiar New Zealand landscape; a local landscape that is both sublime and melancholic, and in the context of Woodruffe’s paintings has been described as the portrayal of a “New Zealand Gothic, ominous and threatening”.

Woodruffe’s Dangerous Looseness of Doom exhibition in 2010 explored the world of memories, where all too often aspects of our individual and collective worlds are reduced to theatre. The works here could be described as arousing, unsettling, offensive, trivial, innocent, or possibly threatening, however Woodruffe’s subdued palette and delicately executed, reductive process of painting, has an overall restorative effect on the viewer – there is a sense of stillness.

The works that Woodruffe has produced for his 2011 exhibition Time is a Thief are reminiscent of classic nostalgic photography. They capture a sense of time forgotten and preserved; an ongoing moment. Touching on various Art Historical and technical references, his paintings are laden with a hopeful sense of wistfulness. These images are lost memories, built on the constructed realities of history and what went before. Woodruffe sources images from a range of places including old magazines and paintings from antique stores, re-imagining the life of these found images onto the canvas on which he works.