At the National College of Art, Swift won a travelling scholarship to study in France and Italy. In the 1950s he settled in London and was associated with a group of artists and writers in Soho such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, George Barker and Patrick Kavanagh and in 1959 he co-founded with the poet David Wright a quarterly magazine “X”, in which Swift, under a nom de plume (James Mahon), attacked abstract art as the art of the establishment.
In 1962 he emigrated to Portugal where he f
ounded the Porches Pottery which started a revival of interest in indigenous traditional ceramics. In 1993/4 the Irish Museum of Modern Art staged a major retrospective exhibition of his work.
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