For 35 years Mark Mothersbaugh has managed to sustain an extraordinarily varied creative life. In the 1970s and 1980s his band, Devo, were part of the post-punk boom, an art-school quartet from Akron, Ohio, who made strange films and created all their own artwork as well as costumes that made them look like Playmobil toys.

For the past two decades he’s also produced soundtracks, from the infectiously original theme for the children’s cartoon Rugrats to all the music for the films of the acclaimed indie director Wes Anderson. Now the first major display in the UK of his work is at Norwich Arts Centre.

Mothersbaugh is based in Hollywood, his studio inside a garish green circular building on Sunset Boulevard, as though to remind his film- industry visitors that, once upon a time, all this creative stuff was meant to be fun. Inside there are more eccentric touches: side-tables made of polythene-covered straw bales, a glass table with bicycle wheels where the legs should be.

“I grew up in a place where the idea of being an artist, and doing it for a living, seemed like a fantastic concept,” he says. “I didn’t know anybody that had ever been an artist or a musician full-time. So when Devo started we were all totally committed.” The band tours only occasionally now, but the musicians recently worked with Disney to create Devo 2.0, a perky children’s band. Meanwhile Mothersbaugh’s company, Mutato Musika, creates quirky, original soundtracks for films, TV, computer games and adverts. Last year there were 35 exhibitions of his visual art as well as numerous side-projects and new obsessions.

Now 55, Mothersbaugh is an unlikely artist. As a child he was extremely short-sighted. He’s still legally blind and sees the world through thick glasses that bend the corners of the room towards him: “It’s like looking in a shiny doorknob,” he says. At school he enjoyed drawing, working close to the paper.

In the Sixties he started sending his art by post to artists such as Robert Indiana and Andy Warhol, and often getting something in return. When he began touring with Devo, making postcards for friends was a way of alleviating the boredom of life on the road.

One day he realised that they were telling the story of his life, day by day. So he began filing them away as his personal diary. He now has more than 30,000, and makes new ones every day. He rarely uses real postcards now, just pieces of paper he stores in his pocket.

The day we met, he’d made a few during a meeting with a film producer, drawing while his client listened to the music. “It’s almost like a therapeutic activity, because things that drive other people crazy, I turn into a work of art,” he laughs. “It’s probably saved me from a lot of antisocial behaviour.”

Nine years ago he began choosing interesting images from his archive and creating limited-edition prints in large sizes suitable for gallery walls. Prices for framed prints start at £110.

As well as the Postcard Diaries, his show in Norwich includes some Beautiful Mutants, a series he started eight years ago, initially playing with cameras and funhouse mirrors, but eventually moving to computers to get a more exact result. He slices a picture in half — frequently vintage photographs, another of his many collections — and then flips the image to create a strange but perfectly symmetrical whole, the photographic equivalent of a Rorschach drawing.

It started almost as play, the digital equivalent of doodling on magazine pictures to make celebrities cross-eyed. The exhibition prints are large, but his personal copies are palm-sized and stored in antique photo cases. Some are unsettling, some are funny, but the best ones have an eerie beauty, the faces recognisably human yet completely alien in their perfect symmetry.

He doesn’t see his art as any big leap from his role in the band. “With Devo we wanted to be a clearing house for ideas. At the time we were sure rock’n’roll was going to perish when audiovisual artists came on to the scene. We felt that people wanted to see music and hear artwork, and we were certain that when music television came along, it was going to be great.”

But Mothersbaugh was disappointed with the direction MTV finally took. “I thought it was going to change the world culturally, and instead it became just like Home Shopping Network for record companies.” Now he hopes that the internet will do the job instead. “I’m pretty excited about what the new world will bring.”

Mark Mothersbaugh 2006, Norwich Arts Centre (01603 660352), until June 28