Woodruffe is interested in the body as a site of power, intimacy, corruption and sexuality. With an expressive, almost sculptural attention to anatomy registered in planes of light and hollow shadows, Woodruffe depicts bodies engaged in acts ranging from the intimate to the disturbing, both sexual and monstrous. Jane Marshall, in an article, links Woodruffe's work to the notion of the abject, suggesting that they break down the boundaries between the erotic and the pornographic, the beautiful and the monstrous, power and resistance, and self and other.

In his most recent work, Woodruffe has turned his attention to the New Zealand landscape, which for him is "full of flux, ancient and young, violent and full of hope". Through a series of small paintings like glimpses from the window of a moving car, Woodruffe captures the momentary dramas of faint hills, curling roads, and the moody, ever-shifting sky.