ABBOT Hall Art Gallery is staging A Whole Day of Art on Saturday (February 21), from 10.30am-4pm, when those who feel creative can join activities at the Kendal gallery and around the grounds.

To start with, you can be photographed by Kendal College students in the hallway. Students have been asked to photograph faces from the community that will fill the windows of the gallery during the Face Value: Portraiture from the Arts Council Collection exhibition.

Meanwhile, get messy with mud to create an earth drawing (messy clothes recommended) in a drop in workshop outside the gallery (in all weathers) to create a giant mural.

Additionally, there's a poetry trail inspired by the beautiful and haunting words of artist Richard Skelton. Pick up a Poetrail from the front desk and follow the rhythm of Richard's words as they guide you around the gallery.

Listening to the Land runs from 10.30am-12.30pm, and features well-known man of sound, Dan Fox, helping to find sounds in found objects, create a temporary site-specific aeolian sound sculpture, record with contact microphones, listen with wireless headphones and create a sound sculpture in the gallery.

Elsewhere at the gallery from 1pm-3pm, you can work with the artist Paul Mason, exploring the textural qualities of the ground on location around Abbot Hall, creating castings with plaster and putting together your own relief using clay and found objects.

To book telephone 01539-722464.

The following Thursday (February 26, 6.30pm), Abbot Hall Art Gallery hosts a talk by Dr Patrick Elliott who introduces the work of Boyle Family, whose Contemporary Archaeology exhibition is running at the gallery until March 14. Mr Elliot is senior curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, where he has been responsible for exhibitions involving leading figures in the Modern and Contemporary art movements. Booking is essential on 01539-722464.

Boyle Family have beguiled viewers with their contemporary explorations of the world ever since Mark Boyle and Joan Hills, and later their children, Sebastian and Georgia, started collaborating in the 1960s, seeking to present the environment as truthfully and objectively as possible.

They are best known for their astonishing earth studies: facsimiles of the ground taken from randomly chosen points in the world that resemble slices of the landscape fixed to the gallery walls. Their approach has been likened to that of NASA space research, voyaging to far-flung places to probe, obtain data and extract samples from the surface of the planet. A sort of contemporary archaeology that excavates the present rather than the past.