Upon returning to Ontario, she was commissioned to paint a mural for the new dining hall at the University of Western Ontario. Along with commissioned portraits, her early works included illustrating, with wood engravings, two books by her brother William Kilbourn, The Firebrand ; The Elements Combined ; and Farley Mowat's, The Desperate People. Kilbourn worked actively in wood engraving from the 1960s to the 1980s. In addition to her book-sized wood engravings, Kilbourn used larger than normal wood blocks to engrave both landscape and figure compositions for individual prints. In 1976 she illustrated Florence Wyle's collection of poems Shadow of the Year published by Aliquando Press. Her wood engraving based on Frederick Philip Grove's Fruits of the Earth was featured on a Canadian memorial 17-cent stamp in 1979. Recently, with Anne Corkett, she selected poems by Richard Outram to accompany illustrations by Thoreau MacDonald, a work commissioned by the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto: South of North: Images of Canada by Richard Outram with drawings by Thoreau MacDonald. In 2012 The Porcupine's Quill published Out of the Wood, a collection of eighty reproductions of wood engravings by Kilbourn, done over a period of fifty years, accompanied by short, elegiac fragments of text that elucidate her unique and influential aesthetic. Some of the reproductions fold out into a double spread; 'Out of the Wood' also includes a full-size reproduction of The Obedience of Noah, which gives an example of the large scale of some of Kilbourn's work.
In the late 1960s Kilbourn began to create stained glass window commissions for churches, including windows for St. Thomas's Anglican Church, Toronto where she illustrated one of T.S. Eliot's poems from the Four Quartets. Other windows include those in St. Bartholomew's Anglican Church in Ottawa.; St. Timothy's Anglican Church, Toronto; St. Michael and All Angels Anglican Church, Toronto; St. James' Cathedral Church, Toronto and Trinity Anglican Church, Ottawa, among others.
Studio and teaching
Kilbourn has lived and worked in an old schoolhouse in the Albion Hills since 1957, and has taught at the Artists' Workshop in Toronto, Central Technical School, and McMaster University.
Kilbourn's work was featured in exhibitions at the National Gallery of Canada in 1966 and 1969. She participated in exhibitions with the British Society of Relief Block Printers from 1973 to 1975. A survey exhibition of Kilbourn's work was held at the Art Gallery of Hamilton in 2018-19.
