"I’m angry, and I don’t even know what I’m angry about,” says Joe Coleman. Whether assuming the role of painter, performance artist, illustrator, writer or freakshow curator, Joe Coleman defies categorisation. His compelling roster of highly detailed portraits – including edgy subjects such as Ed Gein, Charles Manson, Harry Houdini, Edgar Allan Poe and performing freak Johnny Eck – explore the depths of fringe-culture icons, and in the past he has expressed himself by attaching exploding firecrackers to his body and biting the heads off rats in front of an unwilling audience.

“I hate clichés,” the 53-year-old artist spits. “I don’t want to be pigeonholed. I’m just Joe. I feel like a serial killer. But I can put my anger into my paintings and performance art.”

Joe surrounds himself with vintage sideshow posters, serial killer paraphernalia, waxwork murderers and religious icons with a bloodcurdling history. Dozens of glass eyes stare back from every corner of his studio, and framed curiosities cover the Victorian wallpaper from top to bottom. His fridge is peppered with photographs of famous personalities, including Johnny Depp and Iggy Pop, who’ve visited his home and bought his paintings. Even Joe’s bathroom is macabre, filled with fish taxidermies and a tap that’s dripped for so long it’s left a muddy stain on the porcelain.

Coleman’s Odditorium is one of the most comprehensive collections of weird relics from
the darker side of life. His collection is so huge that most of it languishes in a storage warehouse. Last year, at a retrospective exhibit in Germany, the Odditorium occupied four giant floors.

“I feel a responsibility to my collection,” Coleman explains, stroking a stuffed cat. “I don’t think I’d be a good father to a live child, but these items are my children, as are my paintings. They need a place where they’re respected and have a chance to tell their story.

“I have no fucking choice but to house the Odditorium myself. I put relics in this room to try to own or possess my fears, to calm my mind and all the disturbances in my body. These objects have power. It’s called ‘magical thinking’, and sometimes it’s viewed with disdain. Psychiatrists say it’s pathological to invest power in objects. A lot of items are here, not because I wanted them to be here, but because they have a will of their own. Their will is even more important than mine. I also have a piece of Jesus, a fragment of bone. But the thing is, Jesus rose from the dead, so it’s probably some sin that dropped off him.”

Although Coleman leads a reclusive life, his partner is photographer and dominatrix Whitney Ward. She seems to offer Coleman hope in what he sees as a terrifying world. With all the windows in his New York apartment blacked out, Coleman lives his whole life in darkness.

“The best thing in the prison cell that is my human carcass is Whitney,” he says, sipping liquor from a mug emblazoned with a poster of Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks. “I’m happy to see her come through the door. If I go to a hotel room – if I’m doing a tour or something and they put my in a room with white walls – that’s fucking scary. But Whitney is sweet.

“We were once in a hotel and she saw how disturbed I was by the clean surroundings, so she put her hair extension on the bedpost. It looked like a shrunken head and that calmed me down. “Sometimes, I don’t see human beings for months. I’m in this cave and I don’t even get any sunlight. It could be summer, it could be winter, it could be night or day.

I spend eight hours a day living in a tiny little world about this big,” he says, closing his index finger
and thumb to a size smaller than a matchbox. “I know I’m sentenced to a prison called life, for
the crime of being born,” he continues.

“But years ago I used to go out. I did performance art, strapping explosives to my body and going into strangers’ homes and blowing myself up. There’s an element of escape in that because I’m afraid
of being in my body.

“My work from the beginning was about fear. I’m uncomfortable with my own flesh and that’s what the explosions were about. Now everything’s exploding inside me. It’s funny because now there are these Middle Eastern terrorists using human bombs, and they’re all copying me. Everybody’s trying to be like Joe.”

Coleman’s painting technique consists of using a single-haired brush and looking through a pair of jeweller’s lenses strapped to his head. His paintings take around six months to complete, and his last one sold for $250,000 (£126,000).

Joe is currently producing his most ambitious project to date – a self-portrait the size of a door.
“It’ll take four or five years to complete, but I have a backer for the first time and he doesn’t care,” Joe says. “It’s like a diary. I only put down what I experience today, whatever the fuck is happening in my life at the time.

“It includes things in the Odditorium, serial killers, childhood experiences, or movies I’m obsessed with. But the main figure is me. It’s a collection of thoughts, feelings, fears, desires and regrets – anything that might happen on a day.”

Joe’s efforts to defy categorisation make him antagonistic and confounding. Possessing a desert-dry wit, he also has excitable childlike moments when he beams a broken-toothed grin, and he somehow oozes his own peculiar charm.

“A journalist once said I was pathological,” he says. “I’ve always been uncomfortable with ‘art’. When I hear that word I want to grab a gun and shoot someone. So I said, ‘Yes, I’m a pathologist. That, I’m totally comfortable with.’”