Jenny Sands Professor Alice Tay

Alice Erh-Soon Tay (1934–2004) was born in Singapore, where she became a barrister. Emigrating to Australia in 1961, Tay was appointed the Challis Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Sydney in 1975, and in 1986 was made a Member of the Order of Australia for her ‘contribution to teaching and research in law’. Committed to the promotion of human rights, she was president of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. She encouraged the contribution of women from diverse backgrounds to public life.

Jenny Giacco (nee Pollack) exhibited under the pseudonym Jenny Sands. A student at the Julian Ashton Art School in the 1970s, she also trained under realist painter Brian Dunlop, whose work she greatly admired. Dunlop encouraged her to travel to Europe, where she studied masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance and learned the painstaking technique of egg-oil emulsion.

Commissioned by the University of Sydney, her portrait of Tay was completed over several months at the artist’s studio. The work is now in the University Art Collection at the university’s Chau Chak Wing Museum.