Swimmer taught herself to form and fire pots after discovering a deposit of clay near her home in the Big Cove community. She sold her first pots to tourists brought to her home by a park ranger familiar with her work. At the age of 36, Swimmer began working at the
Oconaluftee Indian Village, where Mabel Bigmeat taught her Cherokee pottery-building methods. Swimmer demonstrated pottery making at the village for more than 35 years, often building more than a thousand pots in a summer season. Swimmer was one of the first individuals to propose different uses and names for traditional Cherokee pottery. Swimmer was instrumental in reviving historic Cherokee pottery techniques that had fallen into disuse in North Carolina after the disruption of the mass Cherokee
removal from their homelands to
Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River in 1839. lands in the American West. Swimmer did not use a potter's wheel to create any of her work. Instead, she built all of her pottery by shaping it only with her hands. She used various types of wood to fire it, and the final color of her pottery was determined by the type of wood that she used in firing. ==Legacy and honors==