Through a discussion of my artistic and spiritual practices, I plan to define looking and labor as contemplative acts that allow for an embodied experience of the divine, exploring their role in the context of contemporary art and contemporary Christianity. Through a discussion of my thesis work, I plan to elaborate on my use of the religious icon as an artistic metaphor for this embodied experience of the divine. I hope to explain my attempts to recreate this kind of embodied understanding in my viewer by limiting intellectual access and inviting the viewer to come into awareness and awe in the face of the unfamiliar and inexplicable. I also hope to offer some insight into the original impetus for my thesis work, exploring the role of my own female body in all of this—what it means for my own embodied understanding of the divine that my very body itself is the grounds for discrimination and oppression within a patriarchal religious institution.