Plasticine is cheap,’ Henry Hudson says, pulling open a cupboard to reveal stacks of the plastic-wrapped, candy-coloured modelling clay. ‘It’s oil-based, so you can mix the colours like paint, and it’s only 69p a bar.’

It is not only Nick Park of Wallace and Gromit fame who is putting this classic retro craft material to sophisticated creative use. In his studio, hidden away in a converted hairdresser’s among corner shops and kebab joints on one of the main roads out of east London, Hudson and his assistants are turning 2,000 kilos of this almost comically quaint material into a series of phantasmagorical, dystopian reliefs – sculpted paintings, Hudson calls them – variations on Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress.