Artwork by members of a Mansfield Museum support group has gone on show at Newstead Abbey in an exhibition called Birds, Beasts and Byron.

Green Power uses art inspired by the museum’s natural history collections to help vulnerable woman build their confidence and self-esteem through creative expression, as a kind of ‘art on prescription’.

The group evolved out of the two-year Art Power group that was set up in 2022 and ran with a similar objective.

Last September Green Power visited Newstead Abbey and forged a creative partnership with the poet Lord Byron’s former home, and the flora and fauna that are found there and were part of Byron’s life.

It led to various pieces of artwork inspired by both the museum’s natural history collections and the abbey. Now this work has gone on display at the abbey’s Project Lab, next to Byron’s study. The exhibition runs until Easter.

Working with freelance artists Dawn Ireland, Michelle Reader and Beth Thompson, Green Power participants have created various artworks. They include a textile hanging made with recycled materials and reflecting on the museum’s bird taxidermy collection. They have also created tufted rugs of their own domestic animals.

Other artworks draw on the animals that featured in Byron’s life, including Boatswain, his beloved dog, and a bear that he famously took with him to Cambridge in defiance of their no dogs rule.

Users of the group responded to Byron’s romantic poetry and critiqued his well-documented adultery and mistreatment of women, resulting in poems by group members that are recorded for the abbey exhibition.

Tamsin Greaves, who co-ordinates the group and co-curated the exhibition, said: “The Green Power group is continuing the valuable work of its predecessor, Art Power, with a focus on the power of nature for healing. The project has seen women who arrived anxious and apprehensive now empowered artists, speaking their truth.”