Being part of the community, the craftsman is well aware of the community aesthetics, and how members of the local culture will respond to the work. They strive to create an object which matches community expectations, working within (mostly) unspoken cultural biases to confirm and strengthen the existing model. With a defined form and measurable standards, these objects can then be sorted in a series through time and space. "An object's ability to be measured allows for the expression of repetition and variation in exact and comparable units. Measurement helps us describe standards of form within a culture." How did the usage and shape change over generations? Can these same forms be found in other regions? This enables the study of these forms using the Historical-Geographical method of folklore studies. The progressive transformations of the known form can be tracked as the form is simplified, enriched, improved in its utility. A series of folk objects in a given form also tracks changes in the pattern, symmetry and ornamentation introduced by different artisans working with this form. No two hand-crafted items are identical. While the shared form indicates a shared culture, deviations in the form give voice to an individual artisan. The craftsmen creating these folk objects are not unknown; even without their names, they have frequently left an individual stamp on their work. Sometimes these deviations in the production are unintentional, just part of the process. But sometimes these deviations are intentional; the artisan wants to play with the boundaries of expectation and add their own creative touch. They perform within the tension of conserving the recognized form and adding innovation. The folklorist Barre Toelken identifies this tension as "... a combination of both changing ("dynamic") and static ("conservative") elements that evolve and change through sharing, communication and performance." Over time, the cultural context within the community shifts and morphs: new leaders, new technologies, new values, new awareness. Gerald Pocius uses different words to articulate this phenomenon. “Art manipulates traditions rather than being constrained by them. Art involves creation. And all creation is partly culturally based. Artists live in a particular time period and in a particular place. Thus creation never occurs completely in a vacuum; it must involve choice of techniques, as well as content, that are all culturally influenced and learned…. Art involves the relation between "individual creativity and the collective order," In its most basic form, creativity is memories reconfigured. For folk art objects, the interplay between tradition and individual innovation is much more visible than in other forms of . A book on the history of art was published in 1962: "".