Cherie Potter

I grew up on a farm in a remote area of Australia. My primary school only had twelve students, and the closest town with a population of over twenty thousand was two hours away. I went to a boarding school for my high school years and to follow my interest in history and heritage conservation I moved to the capital city, Canberra, which was five hours away from home for university. I graduated with a Bachelor of Heritage, Museums and Conservation from the University of Canberra in 2016, where I specialised in heritage management and artefact conservation.

 

I very much enjoyed my degree and relished the hands-on nature of the profession. Consequently, I undertook an internship with a heritage firm to study archaeological illustration during the last semester of my degree. Recording heritage on paper for publications for future generations really resonated with me, and the chance to record these in the digital world is something that really excites and motivates me. This is what inspired me to travel to the other side of the world, to Scotland, to study my Masters and start steering my career in a direction that will help me achieve my dreams and align my profession with my passion.

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During the course of my Masters Degree in International Heritage Visualisation at the Glasgow School of Art I have had the opportunity to work with a range of visualisation and interaction media for a variety of platforms such as virtual and augmented reality, mobile interactive games, and real-time applications. I have become fully competent in programs such as 3Ds Max, ZBrush, and Substance Painter. I am also familiar with Adobe programs including Photoshop and After Effects, and the ways these can be integrated with 3d modeling. In addition to 3D modeling, I am also fully competent in game and interactive application development using the game-engine Unity. As well as being digital media skilled, I am similarly experienced in using digital documentation techniques such as laser scanning, photogrammetry, and reflectance transformation imaging (RTI), and the digital programs relating to them, such as Agisoft Metashape and Leica Cyclone.

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Unfortunately, the COVID lockdown in the UK forced me to return to Australia after I had graduated. However this opened up new opportunities for me, and I am now working as a Visitor & Interpretation Officer for Museums of History NSW (formally Sydney Living Museums/Historic Houses Trust). I love getting to work with historic houses and their collections every day and hope to help digitise them as another level of preservation for future generations.