By Wong Ka Ying / There is an ancient saying on the Orkney Islands: “If you scratch the surface in Orkney, it will bleed archaeology.” This group of about 70 small islands is slightly smaller than Hong Kong but home to only 20,000 people. Despite its small size, Orkney has long produced artists and attracted creatives from elsewhere to its shores. In 1979, a modest yet significant art gallery was established, the Pier Arts Centre, in Stromness, Orkney’s second-largest town. Scotland’s northernmost art gallery, it’s a sea away from the Svalbard Museum in Norway, the world’s northernmost museum. The gallery was not created by wealthy elites or set up by the government but by Margaret Gardiner, an anti-fascist, anti-Vietnam War pacifist and writer, alongside her artist friends. Gardiner descended from a prominent family – her father was an Egyptologist involved in the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. After graduating from Cambridge University, she briefly worked as a teacher and then, from the early 1930s onwards, devoted herself to social activism. She was also a major supporter of the artists …