Swindell was born in Stoke-on-Trent to a family long connected with the pottery business, though he began his artistic training as a painter, -attending Stoke-on-Trent College from 1960 to 1967. Moving to London, he began his ceramics training with Hans Coper at the Royal College of Art, from 1967 to 1970. 
For the next five years he was a lecturer at York School of Art, 
and then lecturer at Cardiff School of Art, University of Wales, from 1975 to 2003.

Swindell’s works are small in size, which he attributes to the experiences of his childhood: “I was brought up in a small end of terrace houses with parents, grandparents, and uncle. I slept in a baby’s cot in my parent’s room until I was seven. When my uncle left home I transferred to his box room measuring five feet by six feet. This was my only personal space until I left home aged twenty-two.” Today he still feels most comfortable in small places, and his studio in Cardiff is the same size as that box room.

His visual sources are varied though often based in nature, pared down to their essential elements, creating an ambiguous, mysterious presence. Thrown on a potter’s wheel, it is the colored glazes that create a feeling of synthesis between the mechanical and organic aspects of the work, “like a man-made object being eroded by time and taken back by nature.”