Heather Spears

She returned to Canada annually to conduct speaking and reading tours and to teach drawing and head-sculpting workshops.

[9] After her children grew up,[5] Spears began returning to Canada annually to conduct reading and speaking tours, and teach drawing and head-sculpting workshops.

To support her children as a single parent in Bornholm, Spears sold oil paintings and drawings, and also taught.

At first she had difficulty drawing babies' faces, so she honed her skill by sketching infants in a local hospital at night.

[5] Later she traveled to maternity and neonatal intensive care wards in hospitals in North America, England, Sweden, and the Middle East, to sketch women in childbirth and critically ill newborns.

[3][15][16][17] Spears began accepting private commissions from parents to draw their stillborns and babies who had died after birth.

[15] In 2016, she mounted an exhibition at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford called "Drawing the First Breath", showcasing sketches of more than 100 childbirths and 25 neonatal infants that she had drawn over the previous three decades.

[19] In spring 1989, during the First Intifada, Spears spent six weeks in the Palestinian National Authority to draw children injured in the conflict.

[20] Spears produced 300 pencil and chalk drawings of wounded children in hospitals, surgeries, refugee camps, West Bank villages, and military courts.

[20] She published 75 of the drawings in a paperback book titled Drawn from the Fire – Children of the Intifada, which includes an Arabic-language explanation of how each child was wounded.

[10] Spears won three Pat Lowther Awards – for her 1986 poetry collection How to Read Faces, her 1988 poetry collection The Word for Sand, and her 2000 book of drawings Required Reading: A witness in words and drawings to the Reena Virk Trials, 1998–2000.